When she finds out that R is also one of the people who doesn’t lose his memories-and is thus in danger of being captured and killed by the Memory Police-she comes up with a plan to hide him. She trusts her editor, R, with her manuscripts. As an adult, the narrator is a writer, and she’s published a few novels. The narrator is grateful that her father didn’t live long enough to see birds disappear, because he was an ornithologist, and living without birds would have devastated him. Her father also died, though of natural causes. In the present, the narrator is grown up and lives alone. Eventually, a state force called the Memory Police found out that the mother did not lose her memories, and they summoned her to their headquarters-a week later, she died, and the narrator is sure that the Memory Police killed her. The narrator loved hearing her mother talk about these mysterious objects, even though she was unable to remember them or create any associations with any of these items.

When the narrator was a young girl, her mother used to show her a cabinet full of secret items, all objects that had been disappeared years ago. The story takes place through the eyes of the unnamed narrator, a young woman whose mother was part of a minority of people on the island whose minds are not affected by the disappearances. Nature, too, seems to comply with the mysterious rules of these disappearances, like when roses disappear and the wind somehow knows to only blow off the rose petals and not other flowers’ petals. The Memory Police takes place on an unnamed island where a mysterious, supernatural force makes things “disappear.” “Disappearances” start in the mind-people on the island first lose all association with the object that’s been disappeared, and then they physically get rid of the item (if they can) by throwing it in the river or burning it.

Yoko ogawa the memory police