On a cloudy morning you wake up. As your warm feet touch the cold floor, a sensation of loss jolts you. It’s the feeling of having a word on the tip of your tongue but knowing you won’t remember it. You’re haunted by something profound. How do you mourn a nameless and shapeless loss?

This is the world of Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police; an island where a mysterious organization keeps erasing objects from public consciousness. One day books are outlawed and the town sets about starting skyscraper-height bonfires, condemning centuries of knowledge to ash and dust that turn the sky black. People wake up the next day unaware of what a book is and how it looks and feels. Another day it is birds that have been outlawed. Repeated excommunications turn people into hollow shells, cut adrift from the materiality of objects, buoyant sentient islands no longer anchored to reality or to each other. 

Read More