An unnamed narrator lives on an unnamed island, alone since the deaths of her mother and father some years before. A novelist, her only friends are her editor and an old man who used to be her family’s handyman. When she isn’t writing, she spends most of her time ruminating on the curious nature of life on this island. At unpredictable intervals, things disappear from the island, even from each inhabitant’s memory. On the morning of a disappearance, they all wake up knowing that something has been disappeared and must now be purged from existence. All such objects or their images are burned collectively, and the disappearances are enforced by the fearsome Memory Police.
The Memory Police act with terrifying efficiency to root anyone who might be tempted to hold on to their banished possessions. When birds are disappeared, they search the narrator’s home because her father had been an ornithologist. Our narrator is relieved that her father did not live to see this particular disappearance.
The Memory Police are also known to take people out of their homes. Those taken are almost never seen again. When these abductions increase, the narrator becomes increasingly concerned for her editor, who she knows is one of the few people on the island able to retain their memories of the disappeared items. If the Memory Police discover his ability both he and the narrator will be in danger.
This has all the makings of a literary thriller, but Ogawa seems uninterested in developing the plot in that direction. There is no heroic resistance to the encroachments of the Memory Police, no fight, no flight. The narrator and the rest of the island’s inhabitant’s more or less just give in to their inevitable fate, as more and more of their memories are erased. Ogawa is more concerned with the narrator’s inner life, but for as intriguing as the premise of the novel is, any attempt to depict it in writing is inherently flawed. You can’t talk about how you no longer remember birds, or photographs, or roses, without referring to the thing itself. So have you really forgotten it?
Reading Ogawa’s novel was a tremendously frustrating experience, as her characters never seemed to behave in ways I could relate to or understand at all. The passive acceptance of their absurd status quo became infuriating. I also grew quite bored with the insertions of the narrator’s novel in progress, which was thematically and stylistically so similar to the rest of the novel I didn’t quite see the point of its inclusion.
All of this is really just a long-winded way of saying that I was bored. Very, very bored.