This is a melancholy book that lingers in slow spaces of the story. It’s not an action-packed dystopia–but it definitely is a dystopia.
The story is set on an island (presumably a Japanese one) where our main character describes her life as a novelist. Her father, an ornithologist, and her mother, a sculptor, have passed, but they also play a part in the story. The island they live on is run by an unnamed authority who sometimes causes things to disappear – one day, everyone is enjoying their oranges, and then overnight they wake up and realize that oranges are now disappeared. Everyone willingly finds their oranges and disposes of them, and everyone then forgets that oranges ever existed. This happens with things as small (!) as oranges but also with things as large as birds (!) – she notes that she is glad that birds disappeared after her ornithologist father passed.
Our heroine has two friends and is writing a novel, which is also gradually revealed to us as the book progresses (I enjoyed this book-within-a-book; it’s a hard gimmick to pull off but Ogawa did a great job). She discovers that some people – her mother among them – don’t forget. This is the central mystery of the book, and leads our heroine to make some dangerous decisions.
But the other mystery for us, the readers, is what’s wrong with all these people who do forget? Why don’t they protest? Why don’t they rebel? Why is everyone so passive?! The story of why these things disappear – who is making these decisions, how they enforce it – is left unexplored for the most part. This is about someone just trying to make the most of their daily life in the regime, not like, a fired-up rebel looking for the plans of the Death Star.
This can be read as a warning about an Orwellian warning of fascism of course – the state tells you what to remember and what to forget. I think it’s also about how easy it is to make ourselves and our lives smaller; how easy it is to accommodate unreasonable demands, how much power we willingly give up. It could also be read as a study in grief and loss – when you miss someone and one day realize that your memory of them has faded.
