Our unnamed protagonist in this 1994 Japanese novel, as translated by Stephen Snyder, is a novelist who lives on an island controlled by the Memory Police. The feared group’s sole purpose is to periodically "disappear" objects and ideas from the town—first small objects like emeralds, ribbons, and candy, but over time, the disappearances grow more profound. Birds vanish, then photographs. But the truth is that not everyone "forgets" what they are supposed to, which puts them in great danger from the Memory Police, whose duty is to make sure the disappeared items are fully eradicated. If any citizens stand in their way, they will be disappeared as well—which is how our young novelist ends up putting herself in danger. The gentle prose is lovely in its own right, and perfectly suits the story's eerie feel. This novel went places I didn't expect, right up to the stunning conclusion.

From the publisher: "He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem—ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper—with a ten-year-old son—who is hired to care for the Professor. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor's mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities—like the Housekeeper's shoe size—and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away."