Japanese author Yoko Ogawa was inspired by the works of Franz Kafka and George Orwell (particularly his book 1984) in writing her science fiction novel The Memory Police (published in Japanese in 1994; published in English in 2019), which tells the story of an unnamed writer who lives on an island controlled by the eponymous Memory Police. The Memory Police force inhabitants of the island to forget certain objects or concepts or people, going so far as to take the items completely off the island. But, with the help of a neighbor, the unnamed writer fights back against the oppressive regime and hides out in her room, fearing that they will take something which matters tremendously: her fear.
When it was released, The Memory Police received positive reviews. The New York Times, for example, loved the book, writing that "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."
