Exquisitely dystopian. Written in 1992, but not translated into English until 2019, this is a haunting and poignant tale of how important memory and voice are to freedom and sense of self.

The narrator is a young novelist who observes the things around her disappearing: perfume, jewels, ribbons, even birds and spring. More disturbing than their disappearance is the inability of people to remember those things once they are gone. The Memory Police roam the landscape, searching for the few folks who inexplicably can still remember what they've lost, and then they too vanish along with their memories.

The narrator/novelist is in the middle of writing a strange story about a typing teacher who locks away one of his students in a clock tower. The narrative echoes the increasing sense of isolation the narrator is experiencing in the larger novel. As the Memory Police escalate disappearances, the writer hides her editor in a secret room in her house, and he desperately tries to get her to keep writing. He is oblivious to the horrors happening outside of his hideaway.

Book burning always gets to me and it is described here with chilling elegance:
"The library continued to burn. I picked up one of the books from the pile at my feet and threw it out the window. It opened and flew through the air, cleared the underbrush and fell gently into the flames. The pages had caught the breeze, and it fluttered as it flew, as if dancing on air."

Authoritarian societies frequently take pains to destroy parts of their past that don't jibe with their current belief systems by burning books, pulling down statues, rewriting history, or by assassination. This is how they get people to behave. If we can't remember then we won't regret. And when we don't regret we are more apt to become willing subjects.

In a novel that feels like an allegory, Ogawa spins a complex and moving tale about the price a society pays when it silences its people, especially its writers. Her focus on the importance of memory is especially apt coming from a culture that maintains a strong sense of ancestry and tradition along side its vibrant contemporary sensibility. Nevertheless, it is a warning to democratic civilizations everywhere that freedom of expression is indispensable.

p.s. I didn't give the book 5 stars because the last type of disappearance seemed awkward and didn't work for me.