The power of humor and family and constructed family that are in many ways similar to The Diary of Anne Frank.” “You see that clearly in the hidden room and in the continuation of daily life. “ has talked about as, in some ways, her most direct response to the kind of horrors that Anne Frank depicts in her work,” he says. Snyder explains that Ogawa has previously invoked and responded to the power of The Diary of Anne Frank in her work, but the diary’s influence is most explicit in The Memory Police. I also think she was depicting Nazi Germany as well and dramatic deletion of people and things.” So may be using those kinds of gestalts to figure out exactly what kind of world she was depicting. would redact photographs and eliminate figures who had been murdered or been removed from the political spectrum. “I don’t think that Yoko was particularly commenting on Japanese society in this text,” says Snyder, who first worked with Ogawa when he translated her short story “Pregnancy Diary” for The New Yorker in 2005, “…there certainly are ways in which there’s a collective amnesia, for instance, about the the Second World War this is much more similar to totalitarian society the Stalinist deletion of people who had been eliminated. Stephen Snyder, Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College. Despite The Memory Police initially being published over 20 years ago, Ogawa’s “fantasy dystopia” is one of those rare works of fiction that can help us better understand the world we currently live in, according to its translator Dr. Ogawa-a household name in Japan, and winner of the prestigious Akutagawa and Shirley Jackson prizes among others-has been steadily breaking into the American literary scene one translation at a time. Today, August 13, Ogawa’s canonical novel makes its tragically timely English debut. Although the book is decades old, it has only grown more apposite as countries around the world expand mass surveillance efforts and feed citizens false information. Originally published in Japanese in 1994, Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is a dystopian tale of struggle against state censorship as the world around the central character begins to literally disappear. The surrealist Japanese novel that predicted our current cultural amnesia is now available in English.

Yoko ogawa's the memory police