Author Guide · Japanese Literary Fiction
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Yoko Ogawa read The Diary of a Young Girl as a teenager and has said it was the reason she became a writer; years later she wrote a scene in The Memory Police, a man moving into a hidden room on a rainy day, as a homage to Anne Frank. Born in Okayama in 1962, she studied literature at Waseda University, worked as a secretary at a medical university, and wrote at home while her husband was at work; he did not know she was a writer until her debut won the Kaien Prize in 1988. She has since published about fifty books in Japanese and won the Akutagawa, Yomiuri and Tanizaki prizes. Six of her books are available in English, all translated by Stephen Snyder. This guide covers her 6 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 key books · 1990–2006 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Six Yoko Ogawa books are available in English: The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris, Revenge, The Memory Police and Mina’s Matchbox, published in English between 2008 and 2024. The best known are The Memory Police (1994; in English 2019), a National Book Award finalist, and The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003; in English 2009), the first winner of Japan’s Booksellers’ Award. Start with The Housekeeper and the Professor. The years below are the Japanese first editions; the English dates are in each description.
Where to Start with Yoko Ogawa
If you want her gentlest and best-loved novel
→ The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) — a mathematician whose memory lasts 80 minutes.
If you want the book everyone is talking about
→ The Memory Police (1994) — an island where things, and the memory of them, disappear.
If you want linked dark stories
→ Revenge (1998) — eleven tales that cross into one another.
If you want a warm coming-of-age novel
→ Mina’s Matchbox (2006) — a girl’s year in a mansion in Ashiya.
6 Yoko Ogawa Books in English, in Order
The Diving Pool
Her first book in English (2008, translated by Stephen Snyder), collecting three early novellas first published in Japan in 1990 and 1991. In the title story Aya, daughter of the couple who run an orphanage, secretly watches her foster brother Jun at diving practice and torments a small orphan. In “Pregnancy Diary”, which won the Akutagawa Prize, a woman keeps a diary of her sister’s pregnancy and feeds her grapefruit jam that may be toxic; in “Dormitory” a wife nurses the armless, one-legged manager of her old student dormitory. The collection won the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award.
The Housekeeper and the Professor
Published in Japan in 2003 and in English in 2009 (translated by Stephen Snyder). A mathematician, brain-damaged in a car accident in 1975, can keep new memories for only 80 minutes. His housekeeper and her ten-year-old son, whom he nicknames Root, win him over through numbers and their shared love of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team. It won the Yomiuri Prize and was the first winner of the Hon’ya Taishō (Japan Booksellers’ Award); the paperback sold a million copies in two months, and Takashi Koizumi filmed it in 2006.
Hotel Iris
Published in Japan in 1996 and in English in 2010 (translated by Stephen Snyder). Mari, seventeen, works the front desk of her widowed mother’s run-down seaside hotel. She is drawn to a guest, an unnamed older man who translates Russian, and takes the ferry to his house on an island for a violent, sadomasochistic affair. NPR’s Maureen Corrigan called it “decadent, minimalist, profoundly sad and warped”.
Revenge
Published in Japan in 1998 and in English in 2013 (translated by Stephen Snyder). Eleven stories in which places, objects and characters recur: a woman buys strawberry shortcake for a son who died years earlier, a landlady grows carrots shaped like hands, a bag maker is asked to sew a case for a heart that grows outside a woman’s chest, and a brace salesman runs a museum of torture. Some stories turn out to be fictions written by characters in others. It was shortlisted for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
The Memory Police
Published in Japan in 1994 as Hisoyaka na kesshō and in English in 2019 (translated by Stephen Snyder). On an unnamed island, things disappear, birds, roses, photographs, calendars, and the islanders lose the memory of them; the Memory Police destroy what is left and hunt those who still remember. The narrator, a novelist, hides her editor, R, in a secret room under her house. In English it was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature and shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and it won a 2020 American Book Award.
Mina’s Matchbox
Serialised in the Yomiuri Shimbun in 2005, published as a book in 2006 and in English in 2024 (translated by Stephen Snyder). In 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves Okayama to live with her aunt in Ashiya, in a large house with her uncle, a German great-aunt and her cousin Mina, who becomes her friend. It won the Tanizaki Prize; in English it had starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.
In What Order to Read Yoko Ogawa
None of Ogawa’s books continue from one another, so you can read them in any order. This page lists them in the order they appeared in English, from The Diving Pool (2008) to Mina’s Matchbox (2024); the year shown with each book is the year it was first published in Japan. In Japanese order they run: the novellas of The Diving Pool (1990–91), The Memory Police (1994), Hotel Iris (1996), Revenge (1998), The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) and Mina’s Matchbox (2006).
Reading in Japanese order shows how her early, cold stories of cruelty in closed rooms gave way to warmer novels about care and memory. The Housekeeper and the Professor and Mina’s Matchbox are the gentlest; Hotel Iris and Revenge are the darkest, and The Memory Police sits between them.
A reading path
1. The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003)
2. The Memory Police (1994)
3. Mina’s Matchbox (2006)
4. Revenge (1998)
5. The Diving Pool (1990)
Selected Yoko Ogawa Books Not Yet in English
Beyond the 6 key books: 9 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Fiction in Japanese
7
7 books · 1989–2019
- 1989Agehachō ga kowareru toki“The Breaking of the Butterfly”, her debut, winner of the Kaien Prize
- 1994Kusuriyubi no hyōhon“The Ring Finger Specimen”, basis of the French film L’Annulaire (2005)
- 2000Chinmoku hakubutsukan“Museum of Silence”; an English translation by Stephen Snyder is announced for June 2027
- 2004Burafuman no maisō“The Burial of Brahman”, winner of the Izumi Kyōka Prize
- 2009Neko o daite zō to oyogu“Swimming with an Elephant, Holding a Cat”
- 2012Kotori“Little Bird”
- 2019Kobako“Little Boxes”, set in a world without children
Nonfiction in Japanese
2
2 books · 1995–2005
- 1995Anne Furanku no kioku“Memories of Anne Frank”
- 2005Yo ni mo utsukushii sūgaku nyūmon“An Introduction to the World’s Most Elegant Mathematics”, with the mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara
The years · 1962–2024
Quick facts about Yoko Ogawa
- Known for
- Quiet, unsettling fiction about memory, loss and closed worlds, from the gentle The Housekeeper and the Professor to the dystopian The Memory Police.
- 1962
- Born in Okayama
- 2003
- The Housekeeper and the Professor
- 2019
- The Memory Police in English, National Book Award finalist
- 2024
- Mina’s Matchbox in English
- Born
- 30 March 1962, Okayama; she grew up in a family of the Konkōkyō faith
- Education
- Waseda University, Tokyo, degree in literature
- Before writing
- Secretary at a medical university; she stopped when she married
- Lives
- Ashiya, Hyōgo Prefecture, the setting of Mina’s Matchbox
- Translator
- Stephen Snyder has translated all six of her books in English
- Japanese prizes
- Kaien Prize (1988), Akutagawa Prize (1991), Yomiuri Prize and first Booksellers’ Award (2004), Izumi Kyōka Prize (2004), Tanizaki Prize (2006), Medal with Purple Ribbon (2021)
- In English
- Shirley Jackson Award (2008); National Book Award finalist (2019); International Booker shortlist and American Book Award (2020); Royal Society of Literature International Writer (2022)
The red mark is 1994: The Memory Police, written in Japanese then and her best-known book in English since 2019.
How Yoko Ogawa Writes: Small Rooms, Lost Things
Ogawa has said that when she starts a novel, images and a sense of place matter more to her than plot, and that “small spaces are safe”: she can write with reassurance about a space with a clear outline. Her books keep returning to closed places, an orphanage, a student dormitory, a hotel, an island, a hidden room, a mansion behind a wall, and to people who rarely leave them.
Memory and its loss are her central subject. The Professor in The Housekeeper and the Professor forgets everything after 80 minutes; the islanders in The Memory Police forget whatever disappears; Tomoko in Mina’s Matchbox looks back on one year of childhood. She has named Anne Frank’s diary as the book that made her a writer, and the hidden room in The Memory Police is a deliberate homage to it.
Her sentences are calm and plain even when what happens is cruel. In The Diving Pool, Hotel Iris and Revenge the narrators describe poisoning, violence and death without raising their voice, and the horror comes from that flatness. She has said that the further something is from language, numbers, silence, the dead, the more she wants to write about it, and she describes herself less as an inventor of stories than as a medium who passes on the voices of people who have lost the words for their grief.
Watch
Yoko Ogawa and her translator Stephen Snyder
In the Japan Foundation New York’s literary series, first shown in April 2022, Ogawa and her English translator Stephen Snyder talk about her work and the art of translation, with a moderator.
Frequently asked questions about Yoko Ogawa’s books
How many books has Yoko Ogawa written?
About fifty in Japanese, counting essays and nonfiction, since her debut in 1988. Six are available in English, all translated by Stephen Snyder and all on this page: The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris, Revenge, The Memory Police and Mina’s Matchbox.
What are Yoko Ogawa’s books in order?
In order of English publication: The Diving Pool (English 2008; Japanese 1990–91), The Housekeeper and the Professor (2009; 2003), Hotel Iris (2010; 1996), Revenge (2013; 1998), The Memory Police (2019; 1994) and Mina’s Matchbox (2024; 2006). In Japanese order, The Memory Police comes second, after the novellas of The Diving Pool.
Where should I start with Yoko Ogawa?
With The Housekeeper and the Professor. It is short, warm and easy to follow, and it shows her interest in memory at its gentlest. Then read The Memory Police. If you prefer darker fiction, start with Revenge.
What is Yoko Ogawa’s most famous book?
In English, The Memory Police: published in Japan in 1994 and in English in 2019, it was a National Book Award finalist, was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize and won an American Book Award. In Japan, The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) is better known; it was the first winner of the Booksellers’ Award and its paperback sold a million copies in two months.
What is The Memory Police about?
On an unnamed island, objects disappear, birds, roses, photographs, calendars, and the islanders forget them. The Memory Police remove what is left and arrest people who can still remember. The narrator, a novelist, hides her editor, R, in a secret room under her house to keep him from them.
Has Yoko Ogawa won the Booker Prize?
No. The Memory Police was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020, and Revenge for its predecessor, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, in 2014. In Japan she has won the Akutagawa Prize for Pregnancy Diary, the Yomiuri Prize for The Housekeeper and the Professor and the Tanizaki Prize for Mina’s Matchbox.
Which of her books have been adapted?
The Housekeeper and the Professor was filmed in Japan by Takashi Koizumi in 2006, as The Professor’s Beloved Equation. The French film L’Annulaire (2005) is based on her novella Kusuriyubi no hyōhon. In 2020 Amazon Studios announced an adaptation of The Memory Police to be directed by Reed Morano and written by Charlie Kaufman.
Is Yoko Ogawa still alive?
Yes. She was born on 30 March 1962 in Okayama and lives in Ashiya, Hyōgo Prefecture. Her most recent book in English is Mina’s Matchbox (2024), and Harvill has announced The Museum of Silence, translated by Stephen Snyder, for June 2027.
Who translates Yoko Ogawa into English?
Stephen Snyder has translated all six of her books in English, from The Diving Pool (2008) to Mina’s Matchbox (2024), and is translating Chinmoku hakubutsukan as The Museum of Silence.
Footnotes
- Yōko Ogawa — Wikipedia
- Writer Ogawa Yōko’s Stories of Memory and Loss — Nippon.com, 2020
- The Housekeeper and the Professor — Wikipedia
- Mina’s Matchbox — Wikipedia
- A Q&A with Yōko Ogawa and Stephen Snyder — Another Look, Stanford, 2025
- In a Seaside Town, Hidden Desires Surface — NPR, 2010
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“The farther something is from language, the more I want to write about it in fiction.”
— Yoko Ogawa, in a Q&A for Stanford’s Another Look (2025)
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