“The Memory Police,” by Japanese author Yoko Ogawa, is a fictional work about an island where people’s memories of objects disappear at the order of an elusive yet powerful force called the memory police. While the majority of the people living on the island were able to forget objects as decided by the memory police, there were some people who could not forget. In such cases, the job of the memory police is to “remove” these people by bringing them to “research centers.” No one really knows what happens to them after that, but the subtext seems to imply imprisonment in concentration camps.

Any student of Vietnam’s modern history could immediately draw parallels between Ogawa’s world and the consolidation of the police state in the Communist-led state of Vietnam during and after the Vietnam War, especially with the heightened policing of historical narratives in journalism and publishing, as well as the mass detentions of those working for the former South Vietnamese regime, which resulted in concentration camps.