Back to entry: ogawa_yoko | Show links blue

Ogawa Yōko

(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)

links

Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 14:27 pm on 28 March 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ogawa_yoko>