The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

 

Um. Wow. This is like an anarchist-Orwellian body horror novel, with undertones of like aging and/or other inevitable death, and how the aged and dying tend to be forgotten and disappear. It's easy to see the island in the novel as a metaphor for a nursing home or something--though that's plausibly just an unintended resonance or something. This novel is fucking grim, but in a kinda beautiful way, it's probably the first novel in translation I've actually enjoyed in a long time (though I've had enough bad experiences with books in translation that I mostly choose against them, these days). It's probably at least as literary as last night's book, but fucking worlds better.