
The Memory Police
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Traci Kato-Kiriyama
About this listen
2019 National Book Award Finalist
Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize and the 2020 Translated Book Award
New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year
A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.
On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses - until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.
A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
©2019 Yoko Ogawa and Stephen Snyder (P)2019 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"An elegantly spare dystopian fable.... Reading The Memory Police is like sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful, it tingles with dread and incipient numbness.... Ogawa’s ruminant style captures the alienation of being alive as the world’s ecosystems, ice sheets, languages, animal species and possible futures vanish more quickly than any one mind can apprehend." (The New York Times Book Review)
"The Memory Police is a masterpiece: a deep pool that can be experienced as fable or allegory, warning and illumination. It is a novel that makes us see differently, opening up its ideas in inconspicuous ways, knowing that all moments of understanding and grace are fleeting. It is political and human, it makes no promises. It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision.... [It] reaches English-language readers as if sent from the future." (The Guardian)
"A masterful work of speculative fiction.... An unforgettable literary thriller full of atmospheric horror." (Chicago Tribune)
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Overall
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Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm, has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels - at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from-home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from...wherever he says he is. Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his coworker Pradeep to help him escape and to find out what happened to his body.
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Spooky, funny, surprisingly touching
- By TD on 11-03-23
By: Calvin Kasulke
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Territory of Light
- A Novel
- By: Yuko Tsushima
- Narrated by: Rina Takasaki
- Length: 5 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is filled with light streaming through the windows, so bright she has to squint, but she finds herself plummeting deeper into darkness, becoming unstable, untethered. As the months come and go and the seasons turn, she must confront what she has lost and what she will become.
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A poetic metaphor
- By Amazon Customer on 10-21-19
By: Yuko Tsushima
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little scratch
- A Novel
- By: Rebecca Watson
- Narrated by: Ell Potter, Elizabeth Knowelden, PJ Ochlan, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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She wakes up, goes to work. Watches the clock and checks her phone. But underneath this monotony there's something else going on: Something under her skin. Charting the feedback loop of memory, the senses, and modern distractions with wit and precision, our narrator becomes increasingly anxious as the day moves on: Is she overusing the heart emoji? Can drinking eight glasses of water a day really fix everything? Why is the etiquette of the women's bathroom be so fraught? How does she define rape? And why can't she stop scratching?
By: Rebecca Watson
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Never Let Me Go
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.
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Be patient; it will pay off
- By Kc on 05-23-05
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
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A Clockwork Orange
- By: Anthony Burgess
- Narrated by: Tom Hollander
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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A vicious 15-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic, a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. In Anthony Burgess' nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology.
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Great book, great narration, but not for everyone
- By Steve on 06-28-09
By: Anthony Burgess
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The Hole
- By: Hiroko Oyamada
- Narrated by: Brianna Ishibashi
- Length: 2 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Asa’s husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family’s home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws, and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: She makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time.
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Murakami-esque in much except its brevity
- By TiffanyD on 01-29-21
By: Hiroko Oyamada
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Kitchen
- By: Banana Yoshimoto
- Narrated by: Emily Zeller
- Length: 4 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend, Yoichi, and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father), Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.
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First Time is the Charm
- By just asking for some common sense on 08-22-19
By: Banana Yoshimoto
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The Wall
- By: Marlen Haushofer
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness.
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A masterpiece. I’ll be thinking about this for years.
- By John on 06-04-24
By: Marlen Haushofer
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I Who Have Never Known Men
- By: Jacqueline Harpman
- Narrated by: Nikki Massoud
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Deep underground, 39 women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the 40th prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others’ escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.
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WOW, a powerful performance and an incredible book
- By Audible Listener on 09-18-23
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Weather
- A Novel
- By: Jenny Offill
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 3 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives.
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Read This Article Before Listening to Weather
- By MOR Denver on 04-28-20
By: Jenny Offill
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Lakewood
- A Novel
- By: Megan Giddings
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When Lena Johnson’s beloved grandmother dies, and the full extent of the family debt is revealed, the Black millennial drops out of college to support her family and takes a job in the mysterious and remote town of Lakewood, Michigan. On paper, her new job is too good to be true. High paying. No out of pocket medical expenses. A free place to live. All Lena has to do is participate in a secret program - and lie to her friends and family about the research being done in Lakewood.
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Fact or Fiction
- By Penda K on 06-09-20
By: Megan Giddings
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Convenience Store Woman
- By: Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori - translator
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 3 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Tokyo resident Keiko Furukara has never fit in - neither in her family, nor in school - but when at the age of 18 she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of national convenience store chain Smile Mart, she realizes instantly that she has found her purpose in life. Delighted to be able to exist in a place where the rules of social interaction are crystal clear (many are laid out line-by-line in the store's manual), Keiko does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and mode of speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a "normal" person excellently, more or less.
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Am amazing and different story
- By D.R. on 04-10-19
By: Sayaka Murata, and others
What listeners say about The Memory Police
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- elizabeth
- 07-13-24
An unexpected pleasure
Not the typical book, I'd read what I really truly enjoyed it. Even the narration was pleasing after my trip to Japan. I've been reading more books from japanese authors.
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- Thomas J. Lee
- 07-20-22
Interesting dystopian take, not so thrilling
I feel like what I got from this was a serene depiction of a dystopian world clamping down gradually. It was a new take on the genre for me but I did not find it that interesting. I feel like the focus was more on the constant and gradual experience of decline as experienced by very very stoic characters. I didn’t get the satisfaction of learning about any of the whys of the story, though I admit that the pattern of the story is established early enough where that doesn’t come as a huge surprise.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Charles Joseph
- 01-25-23
Sad but Beautiful
I read this on a recommendation. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but it was a truly brilliant book. Even the story within the story, as parts of the book are excerpts from a novel the MC is writing throughout the book, is achingly haunting.
The main story is told from the perspective of an unnamed woman living on an island where their memories of objects are “disappeared” (so thoroughly forgotten that they cannot be recognized for what they are even when plainly visible) and there is a group called the Memory Police that hunt down people who are unaffected by the disappearance of memories. The book follows the MC as she deals with several tribulations caused by the lost memories, including trying to resist the disappearance or even recover things that were disappeared.
Though there are highs and lows, there is always a thread of sadness and growing loss throughout the book. The author is quite good at making the prose emotionally weighty and making the people in the story feel real.
The only thing I can criticize is that it took me out a bit that is that the disappearances and the memory police themselves often felt inconsistent and underexplained. It’s has a fable like quality that just kind of expects you to roll with the unrealistic aspects. The book isn’t about the disappearances and the memory police, it’s about how the MC reacts to them. The whys of how they exist are insignificant to the story being told.
Anyway, the long and short is that the book is incredibly depressing in the most beautiful way and I loved it.
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- Katey Davis
- 03-02-24
Underwhelming
I enjoy dystopian stories a great deal, But it was with this book that I came to realize, I enjoy having a why behind why things are the way they are in the story. Or, even if I don't get a why, I enjoy the characters exploring and unwinding the how behind the way things work in these stories. There is no how or why in this story, just a long tail of how different characters are suffering in their different ways. Mone of the characters were interested in getting out, dismantling the powers that be, or even talking about how they got there. If you like long winded tales about people who have given up, then this is the book for you.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Joe
- 03-05-24
Meh
I love dystopian stories and sad endings but I felt nothing towards the characters, only Don and the old man. I don't even remember if anyone but the dog was named. I get the parallels between the novelist's story and the main story but when I would zone out I couldn't figure out which story I was listening to. It felt bland. also what happened to R's wife and kid?? I get the idea, and maybe a lot is lost in translation, but it fell flat for me.
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- Jessica Glazier
- 09-08-23
Beautiful and haunting
This was a very thoughtful and sad read but well worth it. Do not go into it expecting an exciting story and you won’t be disappointed.
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- Mike Jones
- 03-03-24
Intriguing Read.
Creative and thought-provoking. For fans of Diary of Anne Frank. Great for book clubs. Utopian genre.
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- V P
- 04-20-25
A book about forgetting
Overall 3/5
A dystopian world where everything seems to disappear one by one. It was a sad and slow book.
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- nick zebrowski
- 11-09-21
Murakami without the misogyny
This book provides all the surreal and thought provoking charm of a Murakami novel without the whiny male lead and toxic masculinity. Would recommend
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- Fabio M Ferreira
- 12-08-22
Sad and perfect
Depressing but beautifully written. The audio performance is super well thought out with sound affects to help guide you.
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