This book bears a certain resemblance to The Memory Police, which I read for my Women in Translation book club earlier this year. It's set in a sort of post-apocalyptic indefinite future, a time when the natural world has become contaminated with poisons and children are sickly and weak. Meanwhile, for reasons that are not fully understood, the elderly have just kept on living. The young are so malnourished and ill-developed, that those who are over 70 (and well into their 100s) must take care of them and perform all physical labor. The book is set in a Japan where cities have been abandoned due to toxicity and where the country has completely cut itself off from the outside world (as have most other countries as far as anyone in the book seems to know). In this isolationist future, foreign words are banned – this is where the similarities to The Memory Police were strongest. The book revolves around 108-year-old Yoshiro and his great-grandson Mumei, whom he cares for. Yoshiro – like the narrator of The Memory Police – is a novelist. At one point Mumei observes (to himself without voicing it) how Yoshiro has saved up all these words that are no longer allowed or that represent things that no longer exist and he wonders why. The book was published a few years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and one senses that this recent event must have been the backdrop for readers when it was new, but it also broadly implicates climate change and human impacts on the environment for the disastrous future. It felt very timely.
