Reviews tagging 'Grief'

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

60 reviews

kittm's review

dark sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Emotional abuse, Grief, and Confinement

Moderate: Toxic relationship, Sexual assault, and Physical abuse

Minor: Sexual violence, Rape, and Police brutality

cbala6's review

dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Grief and Death

calicos's review

dark sad slow-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Grief

Minor: Animal death, Death, and Fire/Fire injury

issymaae's review

dark mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Confinement, Police brutality, and Death

Moderate: Death of parent, Sexual assault, and Grief

Minor: Infidelity, Rape, and Animal death

apthompson's review

dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Police brutality, Violence, and Confinement

Moderate: Blood, Death, Animal death, Body horror, and Abandonment

Minor: Emotional abuse, Grief, Sexual content, and Sexual assault

avasbookmark's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Confinement

Moderate: Death, Fire/Fire injury, and Grief

Minor: Rape

steph_phanie's review

dark mysterious sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Grief

Moderate: Death of parent

carolined314's review

challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.75

This is a novel-sized lament, and has some gorgeous writing. It simply didn't hold me.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Confinement and Grief

miaaa_lenaaa's review

adventurous emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

D: if i read this before i went to bed i think i would have gently cried myself to sleep

‘No matter how careful we are, we all leave behind little bits of ourselves as we go about our lives.’

‘Nothing remained on the hillside except things that were quietly awaiting their ruin.’

‘"But how can you hold something that has disappeared?"’

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Grief, Police brutality, Death, and Blood

steveatwaywords's review

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This is my first Ogawa read, and it certainly will not be my last. Her work, Revenge is next, I think, especially after I recently read the short story "Welcome to the Museum of Torture." 

First, do not enter this work thinking you know how books and stories work. Ogawa is going to teach us something new. The narrative success of it may be in question, but there is little doubt that the initial discomfiture and confusion readers experience (both in setting and in narrative pace) are a critical part of what she is up to. For these reasons, if we enter the work seeking a clean and simple "answer" to the mystery of social memory loss, like it's a thriller or detective novel, we will equally be disappointed. Let the novel work on its own terms.

When we do, we find a psychological and emotional dysphoria, an internal world broadcast outward into an external dystopia. Or is it the other way around? In any event, our narrator is herself a writer of novels about writing, memory, and language, themselves highly allegorical. So there is a meta-level to this novel, as well. Which is most significant as a tale to follow?

Along the way, we have plenty of near-nameless characters who test the premise: how should we respond to a world where, each-by-each, its objects are dismantled from both reality and memory? What is the purpose for knowing an objective truth which nevertheless is not shared by a community? How much forced deprivation can or should a people accept before responding? What degree of impoverishment can be normalized? 

I've seen other reviews which place specific allegorical meanings to this novel (mental health metaphors, totalitarian economic policies, marriage, etc.), and I won't say they are wrong. But Ogawa's surreal narratives (or magically realistic ones) don't just echo Orwell or Murakami or even Dazai. But she here has tendrils of memory in all these writers while still taking us, inevitably, somewhere else altogether.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Mental illness, Dysphoria, Dementia, Injury/Injury detail, and Grief

Depending upon how you read the novel, it is easy to see it as a parallel to mental illness, emotional abuse or destitution, etc.