The Memory Police

How do you feel after waking up? There is disorientation and irritability, and you're trying to remember what you dreamed about - but it all slips away. If you could distil that feeling of disorientation and grudging acceptance that comes when you have awoken and compressed it into a novel - it would be The Memory Police.
There's so much and yet so little to talk about this. You could say that the novel has its own Kafkaesque and Orwellian sense of prose and humour, true, but that would be doing it a disservice - Ogawa has her unique brand of melancholy that has to be seen to be believed.
Then again, many questions are left unanswered - how and where does this island exist? How was the technology for selectively discarding people's memories made in an environment where even aeroplanes and mobiles are not present? Why do some people remember everything? What is the moral, if any, of the story-within-a-story? Ogawa doesn't bother answering these questions, and for a good reason - her focus is on the characters more than the setting.
The characters are the fulcrum of the story - but the mute girl and the typing teacher, the Memory Police and the island have a life of their own. I think that is what Ogawa's entire point is, about how inanimate objects and sensations dictate our life. “Hole in the heart” and “hollow soul” are terms that repeatedly pop up when even something like calendars disappear - and I began to wonder if these weren't hyperbolic terms after all.
As a story, The Memory Police is amazing - but as a thought experiment, it is even better - I would rank it amongst the classics of dystopian fiction. Reading this amid a rewriting of history through politics around the world imbued me with a sense of nervous energy I didn't know I had.