Ogawa Yōko
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1962- ) Japanese author, active from the late 1980s. Of her prolific output, the 1990 title story of The Diving Pool: Three Novellas (coll trans Stephen Snyder from various sources 2008) won the Shirley Jackson Award for 2008. She is of sf interest for Hisoyaka na kesshō (1994; trans Stephen Snyder as The Memory Police 2019), a somewhat abstract but intensely narrated Dystopian tale set in something like the Near Future on an isolated Island whose inhabitants are afflicted by progressive memory loss (see Amnesia). The language (see Linguistics) to describe an event, a kind of flower or bird, will suddenly be erased; the Memory Police enforce the physical elimination of anything that has become nameless. This suffusion of Horror in SF can readily be understood as Satirical of modern Japan, sanitized and averse to history. [JC]
Yōko Ogawa
born Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, Japan: 30 March 1962
works (highly selected)
- Hisoyaka na kesshō (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1994) [binding unknown/]
- The Memory Police (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019) [trans by Stephen Snyder of the above: hb/Tyler Comrie]
- The Diving Pool: Three Novellas (New York: Picador, 2008) [coll: trans by Stephen Snyder from various sources: pb/]
- Kamoku na shigai, Midara na tomurai ["Unspeaking Corpse, Unsuitable Interment"] (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Shinsha, 1998) [coll: binding unknown/]
- Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales (New York: Picador, 2013) [coll: trans by Stephen Snyder of the above: pb/]
links
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