The young researchers were kind to me and spoiled me with cookies and hot chocolate. I loved to visit him and went as often as I could-using the excuse that I had to deliver his lunch. He spent several months a year there, collecting data, photographing the creatures, and trying to hatch eggs. He worked at an observatory at the top of the hill to the south. And since there is no map of the island-maps themselves having long since been disappeared-no one knows its precise shape, or exactly what lies on the other side of the mountains. The mountainsides are covered with thorny trees and the summits are always cloaked in mist, so no one ever attempts to cross them. I believe I have cousins living in a village near the source of the river on the far side of the mountains to the north, but I have never met them.

Two years ago, the nurse who took care of me when I was small died as well, of a heart attack. My mother died, and then my father died, and since then I have lived all alone in this house. He has translated works by Yoko Ogawa, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. Stephen Snyder is a Japanese translator and professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College. A surreal and provocative author, Yoko Ogawa has won every kind of Japanese literary award and is author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. The following is an excerpt from Yoko Ogawa's novel The Memory Police in which a young woman concocts a plan to hide her editor beneath her floorboards to save him from the memory police.

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa