But if this is allegory, it isn’t of the Nazis and Holocaust, despite the scenes of rounding people up that echo those of Second World War. That the novel, and the secret room at its center, owes its genesis to the story of Anne Frank would be obvious even if the author hadn’t said so. Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, about an island where entire classes of things, and the memories that go with them, just disappear, a state of affairs enforced by a malevolent and menacing special police force, could be placed in several different buckets, or none at all.
Japanese literature isn’t always neatly accommodated by the buckets often set out to categorize novels.
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