Books like
The Memory Police

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel shares The Memory Police's most disturbing quality: characters who accept a monstrous system with almost no resistance. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth grow up at Hailsham, a boarding school in the English countryside, and slowly come to understand the purpose they were created to serve. Like Ogawa's islanders, they know what is being taken from them and they comply anyway. Both novels use restraint as a weapon, keeping their prose calm and conversational even as the horror of the situation becomes clear.

Ray Bradbury's classic imagines a future where firemen burn books instead of putting out fires, and Guy Montag begins to question the system he serves. The parallel to The Memory Police is direct: both novels depict a society that has decided to systematically destroy categories of knowledge, and both follow someone who begins to hide what the state wants eliminated. Ogawa's narrator conceals her editor in a secret room.

Han Kang's novel and The Memory Police both track the slow disappearance of a person, but from opposite directions. Ogawa's narrator loses the world around her: objects, memories, and categories of experience vanish one by one. Yeong-hye loses herself from the inside out, her refusal to eat meat escalating into a refusal to eat at all, then a desire to become a plant. Both novels treat this process of erasure with a strange, almost clinical calm.

Sayaka Murata's novel operates in a different register than The Memory Police but shares its central preoccupation: what happens to a person who does not fit the patterns society demands. Keiko Furukura has worked at a convenience store for eighteen years and feels no desire to advance, marry, or conform to the life script her family and friends expect. Like Ogawa's narrator, Keiko exists in a world with strict rules about what is normal and what must be eliminated.

Haruki Murakami's longest novel shares The Memory Police's architecture of disappearance and hidden rooms. Toru Okada's wife vanishes. His cat vanishes. He descends into a dry well and enters a dreamlike hotel corridor that may or may not exist.

Hiroko Oyamada's novella occupies the same literary space as The Memory Police: contemporary Japanese fiction where the ordinary curdles into something wrong without anyone raising an alarm. Asa moves to the countryside after her husband takes a new job, and the landscape begins to behave strangely. She sees an animal she cannot identify. A neighbor's child appears and disappears.

Murakami's earlier novel shares The Memory Police's interest in parallel worlds where different rules apply and things go missing without explanation. Fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home and ends up in a private library in Takamatsu. Meanwhile, an elderly man named Nakata, who lost his memory during a childhood incident, can talk to cats and is drawn toward the same destination by forces he does not understand.

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant is the Memory Police readalike that almost feels like a sibling text. An elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, set out across a post-Arthurian England covered in a mist that erases memory, searching for a son they can barely remember they have.

Hiromi Kawakami's Strange Weather in Tokyo, originally published as Sensei no Kaban in 2001 and translated into English in 2012, is the Memory Police readalike for the quiet-Japanese-fiction shelf. Tsukiko, a 38-year-old office worker, runs into her former high-school teacher in a Tokyo izakaya and the two begin a slow, irregular drinking friendship that turns into something else.

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled is the strangest book on his shelf and the one Memory Police fans will spot fastest. Ryder, a celebrated pianist, arrives in an unnamed central European city to give a concert, and over the following 500 pages he wanders through a town where everyone seems to know him, where streets fold back on themselves, and where his own family keeps stepping out of the wallpaper.