Motoko Rich

ASHIYA, Japan — When Yoko Ogawa discovered “The Diary of Anne Frank” as a lonely teenager in Japan, she was so taken by it that she began to keep a diary of her own, writing to Anne as if she were a cherished friend.

To conjure the kind of physical captivity that Anne experienced, Ogawa would crawl, notebook in hand, into a drawer or under a table draped with a quilt.

“Anne’s heart and mind were so rich,” said Ogawa, now 57 and the author of more than 40 novels and story collections. “Her diary proved that people can grow even in such a confined situation. And writing could give people freedom.”

Decades later, Ogawa transmuted her imagining of Anne’s world into “The Memory Police,” a dystopian novel that is Ogawa’s fifth book to be translated into English and which goes on sale in the United States this week. It takes place on a mysterious island where an authoritarian government makes whole categories of objects or animals disappear overnight, wiping them from the memories of citizens.

Those who retain their recall are outlaws who go into hiding. The narrator, a novelist, shelters her editor — who remembers everything — in a room reminiscent of the Dutch annex where Anne hid with her family.

“I wanted to digest Anne’s experience in my own way and then recompose it into my work,” Ogawa said during an interview in her home, in a suburb between Kobe and Osaka.

Although “The Memory Police” was first released in Japan in 1994, the novel is particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe. Throughout the book, citizens live under police surveillance. Novels are burned. People are detained and interrogated without explanation. Neighbors are taken away in the middle of the night.

All the while, the citizens, cowed by fear, do nothing to stop the disappearances. “Regardless of what had happened, it was almost certainly an unfortunate event,” the narrator explains, “and, moreover, simply talking about it could put you in danger.”

Anna Stein, Ogawa’s English-language agent, said she and Stephen Snyder, the writer’s longtime English-language translator, selected “The Memory Police” for translation in 2014. “Of course, the horror of it applies now more than ever in our lifetime,” Stein said.

In Japan, where history itself has been subject to revision — and those who bring up the country’s wartime past can be denounced or even censored — the novel’s lament for erased memories could be read as veiled criticism. Yet Ogawa did not intend to write a political allegory, she said. “I am just trying to depict each individual character and how those characters are living in their current time.”

Lexy Bloom, a senior editor at Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, said she is drawn to Ogawa’s skill with character and detail. “In ‘The Memory Police,’ she is tackling these big themes, but it’s also about these small moments between people,” said Bloom, who has long been a fan of Ogawa’s work, which was previously published in the United States by Picador. “And that’s a hard thing to do effectively.”

None of the protagonists in “The Memory Police” are named. Few markers identify the island, a trait shared by some of Ogawa’s other novels. “I myself like to keep a certain distance from my native culture or environment,” said Ogawa, whose spacious two-story home in an affluent neighborhood overlooking the sea has a Spanish tiled roof, wrought-iron balconies and chairs upholstered in French floral tapestry.

Snyder, a professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College, said Ogawa’s novels relate to Japanese culture in “ancillary ways.” Though she raises socially relevant themes, he said, she is never doctrinaire.

”There is a naturalness to what she writes so it never feels forced,” he said. “Her narrative seems to be flowing from a source that’s hard to identify.”

Growing up, Ogawa wrote for herself. When she married a steel company engineer, she quit her job as a medical university secretary — a common life step for many women of her generation.

While her husband worked, she wrote. She didn’t intentionally keep it secret, she said, but her husband only learned about her writing when her debut novel, “The Breaking of the Butterfly,” received a literary prize.

“I wasn’t telling anyone in a big voice, ‘I’m writing a novel,’” she said. “But I always thought, no matter how my life changes, I want to have a life of writing. Whether I could make any money off it, I did not know.”

Ogawa gave birth to a son, and when he was just a toddler, her novella “Pregnancy Diary” won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature, cementing her reputation in Japan.

She continued to write. “I would change a diaper and then write a sentence,” she recalled. “Then I’d make a meal and write a sentence.”

Sometimes, Ogawa mused about what it would be like to write without such interruptions. “But now that my son has grown, I feel like I was at my happiest when I was writing while raising my child,” she said. “Now that I can write as much as I want 24 hours a day, it’s not as if I produce any greater work now than I did in the past.”

She now writes at a craftsman desk in an airy room with a twin bed for naps and a bookshelf that slides sideways to reveal another full shelf behind it. A whole section is devoted to books about Anne Frank and the Holocaust. She pulled out a copy of Anne’s diary to show that she had tagged virtually every page with a Post-it note.

On her desk, Ogawa keeps a beaver skull, an animal she admires for its industry. It gives her inspiration, she said, echoing the sentiments of the editor in “The Memory Police,” who says that touching objects that have disappeared “became a way of confirming that I was still whole.”

Ogawa achieved bestseller status, and a film adaptation, with “The Professor and the Housekeeper,” another novel with memory as its theme. Much lighter in tone than “The Memory Police,” it tells the story of a single mother who takes a job as a cook and cleaner for a mathematician who cannot remember anything new for more than 80 minutes.

Along with memory, another of Ogawa’s preoccupations is the human capacity for cruelty. “The Diving Pool,” a collection of novellas published in English (including the prizewinning “Pregnancy Diary”), features characters who use subterfuge to inflict pain on people close to them. In “Hotel Iris,” a sadistic older widower engages a 17-year-old high school dropout in increasingly brutal sexual trysts.

Ogawa said she does not write about cruel characters to damn them but rather to explore what might drive someone to physical or emotional violence. “People try to hide it from others or try to cover it up,” she said. “But in the world of literature, you can reveal that nature, and it’s OK to do so.”

Given that she writes vividly about female bodies, and the violence that men can do to them, some critics have dubbed her a feminist writer.

“In a lot of her work she is interested in women’s roles in the family and women’s bodies,” said Kathryn Tanaka, an associate professor of cultural and historical studies at Otemae University in Nishinomiya, Japan. “You really can’t separate that from questions of feminism and untangle her from that gendered private space that her texts inhabit.”

Ogawa resists the label, saying she considers herself an eavesdropper on her characters. “I just peeked into their world and took notes from what they were doing,” she said.

“I see a bridge from that item to the next scene, or I see a rainbow that I have to climb over to move to the next scene,” she said. “That’s how I write.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/books/yoko-ogawa-memory-police.html" id="cf2c26a6-2261-37a6-ad4f-ddaadd7b1749">The New York Times</a>.

'I Just Peeked Into Their World and Took Notes': Yoko Ogawa Conjures Spirits in Hiding

(Profile)

TOKYO — As befits a director whose movies chart the untidiness of Japanese family life, the office of Hirokazu Kore-eda is cluttered with piles of papers, books, photographs, videocassettes and CDs. But it’s the dozens of Frankenstein dolls perched around the room that really capture his emotional point of view.

“I love Frankenstein,” Kore-eda said, reverently. “He is just so melancholy.”

Kore-eda, 56, whose latest work, “Shoplifters,” has received an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film and has been a box office hit in Japan, specializes in stories about people who endure almost unbearable sadness.

In “Shoplifters,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, a group of outcasts who live together as a family rescue a little girl from abusive parents and induct her into their clan of petty thievery. For a while, their ragtag clan seems more authentically connected than some families that share DNA. But — spoiler alert — ethical doubts late in the movie lead to a devastating rupture.

Kore-eda says his films represent an implicit criticism of modern Japan. They tackle themes of isolation and social invisibility, as well as the numbing of souls that can come with professional success.

“Nobody Knows,” one of Kore-eda’s best-known films internationally before “Shoplifters,” is the story of four young children abandoned by their mother in their small Tokyo apartment. In “Like Father, Like Son,” which won the Jury Prize in Cannes in 2013, two sets of parents learn that their 6-year-old sons were switched at birth in the hospital, leading to agonizing decisions that expose class divisions between the families and leave them psychologically battered.

“I don’t portray people or make movies where viewers can easily find hope,” said Kore-eda, during an interview in his studio in the Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo. “Some people want to see characters who grow and become stronger over the course of a film. But I don’t want to make such a movie.”

“It’s such a lie,” he added. “And I don’t want to tell a lie.”

Kore-eda’s vision is starkly at odds with that of Japan’s leaders. With the economy enjoying modest expansion after decades of stagnation, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in a speech at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos last month, pronounced a “long-awaited positive feedback cycle” and trumpeted Japan as having a “hope-driven economy.”

Such rosy rhetoric belies the demographic challenges that Japan faces, with a declining and rapidly aging population and mounting labor shortages. It also overlooks the insecurity that many Japanese feel working in contract or part-time jobs with scant chance of advancement. A little over 1 in 6 people live in poverty. And those who hold full-time jobs are often forced to toil for such long hours that some of them are dying from overwork.

Against this backdrop, Kore-eda has diagnosed a society where local ties have weakened and nationalism is on the rise, particularly under Abe’s right-leaning government.

So when, after he won the Palme d’Or, the country’s education minister invited Kore-eda for a congratulatory meeting, the director demurred.

“I didn’t get the point of why they were trying to congratulate me,” Kore-eda said. “I don’t think it’s right for the government and moviemakers to get too close. So I wanted to keep a distance from the government.”

“Shoplifters” was made in part with government funding, and some critics on social media have bashed the director as anti-Japan or hypocritical. “You took the money and then say that you want to keep a distance” from the government, wrote one blogger. “What a convenient excuse you make.” On Twitter, Tsuneyasu Takeda, a conservative commentator, accused Kore-eda of being a “shoplifting director.”

Kore-eda told an interviewer from Mainichi Shimbun, a Japanese daily, that he was grateful for the public money but viewed it as a subsidy from taxpayers rather than a grant from any particular administration.

“If you think of culture as something that transcends the state,” he said, “then you understand that cultural grants don’t always coincide with the interests of the state.”

The son of a soldier who served in the Japanese Kwantung Army during World War II in the puppet state of Manchukuo in China, Kore-eda grew up attuned to the vagaries of class within his own family. His father, who was a Soviet prisoner of war in Siberia, hopped from job to job, an anomaly in the postwar era of lifetime employment.

Kore-eda remembered visiting his father at work at a chemical factory on the outskirts of Tokyo, anticipating that he would observe him dressed in a lab coat mixing compounds in test tubes. Instead, Kore-eda found his father on the factory floor, wearing a jumpsuit covered in oil stains.

“I could tell he was not well treated or respected in the company,” said Kore-eda, who is now married with an elementary school-age daughter. “It was really shocking, and after coming home I could not really tell him how I felt about him. I felt pity for him.”

His mother, who had grown up in a wealthy family, ended up supporting her children when her husband could not find or keep a job. She worked at a recycling factory and a cake-making plant. Kore-eda said his two older sisters had warned him not to talk about their mother’s work history, out of embarrassment.

She nourished a love of movies in her son, watching Western films starring her favorites, Vivien Leigh and Joan Fontaine, on television with him after school.

But it was Kore-eda’s father who ultimately supported his decision to pursue a career as an artist. His mother urged him to find more stable employment.

At Waseda University in Tokyo, Kore-eda started out intending to become a novelist. But he watched a lot of Japanese television dramas and considered switching to screenwriting. He often cut class to go to the cinema to watch movies by Italian greats like Rossellini, Fellini and Visconti.

“It’s a bit cringy to say,” he said, a trace of a smile emerging from his salt-and-pepper stubble.

After graduation, he started out making documentaries but switched to fictional, feature-length films in 1995 with “Maborosi,” the story of a woman recovering from the suicide of her husband. Stephen Holden, writing in The New York Times, described it as “a pictorial tone poem of astonishing visual intensity and emotional depth.”

The seed of “Shoplifters,” Kore-eda said, came from a news article about an entire family put on trial for shoplifting in Osaka, Japan’s third-largest city. And after making “Like Father, Like Son,” he wanted to further explore the theme of family beyond blood bonds.

In Japan, he said, “people still put a big emphasis on blood ties and family bonds,” a fixation that he sees as sometimes unhealthy.

Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist at Chuo University who has written about Kore-eda’s films, said that “Shoplifters” was a rebuke of the traditional view of the Japanese family, where only blood relations can be trusted.

“There are many families whose members don’t communicate or interact well,” Yamada said. “But the mock family members in the movie care for each other more than some real families.”

In their own way, Kore-eda’s movies offer slivers of optimism as well as moments of impish humor. But does he still have hope for his country?

“I have not thrown away hope,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/world/asia/shoplifters-movie-hirokazu-koreeda.html" id="1f32d560-4bc7-373a-abf3-cf3ac150aa1e">The New York Times</a>.

(The Saturday Profile)

'Shoplifters' Director Pierces Japan's Darker Side

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Motoko Rich

Articles written by the author

'I Just Peeked Into Their World and Took Notes': Yoko Ogawa Conjures Spirits in Hiding

'Shoplifters' Director Pierces Japan's Darker Side