But when I reread the book for the first time in ages, I was shocked that I’d included a tsunami, and it’s frightening to think that rather than getting further away from the world I created in the book, contemporary readers are connecting it with the near future.” A Homage to Anne Frank I had no intention of depicting a near-future setting as a political statement-it was meant to be more like the past, before I was born.

“They were asking me political questions that nobody did 25 years ago. Recounting her experience in American media interviews, Ogawa says that while she felt the essence of the work had been thoroughly conveyed through the translation, she was surprised at the links reporters made to the current US political situation. It has won new readers as a universal tale of memory and loss, while also being interpreted within the trend for dystopian fiction in the English-speaking world. Stephen Snyder’s version of Ogawa’s 1994 Hisoyaka na kesshō was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and at the time of writing has reached the longlist stage of the International Booker Prize.

The Memory Police, a 2019 translation of an Ogawa Yōko novel first written 25 years earlier, has brought fresh attention to a book that, perhaps surprisingly, is being seen as speaking particularly to our twenty-first century times.

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa