Yoko Ogawa is a Japanese author known for her fiction, which explores memory, violence and the female body. She is best known for the novels The Memory Police (1994), The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003), and The Diving Pool (1990). Her work has won the Akutagawa Prize, the Yomiuri Prize and the American Book Award. In 2020, The Memory Police was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Yoko Ogawa was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture. Her family followed the Konkōkyō religion, which shaped her early years. Ogawa studied literature at Waseda University in Tokyo. After graduating, she worked as a secretary at a medical university. When Yoko married a steel company engineer, she left her job and began writing while her husband was at work. Initially, she regarded writing as a personal pastime.
"My husband didn't even know I was writing," she stated. Her debut novel, The Breaking of the Butterfly (1988), won the Kaien Prize. This changed everything.
Her experience of parenting unquestionably shaped her early career. "I wrote Pregnancy Diary in brief intervals while my son was a toddler," she stated. That novella won the Akutagawa Prize in 1990, securing her position in Japanese literature. She continued publishing steadily, producing over fifty works of fiction and nonfiction by 2020.
Ogawa's fiction has been translated into many languages. The English translations are Hotel Iris (1996), Mina's Matchbox (2006) and Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales (1998). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Zoetrope and A Public Space. In 2006, she collaborated with mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara on a book exploring the beauty of numbers.
The Memory Police is set on an unnamed island where objects disappear from daily life, and people soon forget they ever existed. Those who remember are hunted by the Memory Police, a force tasked with erasing memory. The narrator, a writer, hides one such man in her home. The novel was inspired by Anne Frank's diary, which Ogawa first read as a teenager. "Her diary proved that people can grow even in such a confined situation," Ogawa stated. "Writing gives people freedom."
Ogawa frequently explores memory loss, isolation and violence. The Housekeeper and the Professor features a mathematician who can only remember the last eighty minutes. In many stories, she definitively examines how people treat one another when under emotional or physical stress. Her works focus on the female body and women's roles in families, and she avoids the feminist label. "I peeked into the world of my characters and took notes from what they were doing," she stated.
She confidently identifies Paul Auster as a pivotal influence, terming his work "spoken literature." Kenzaburō Ōe praised her for writing prose "that is gentle yet penetrating."
Yoko Ogawa lives in Ashiya, Japan. She was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2021 and was named a Royal Society of Literature International Writer in 2022.
