It’s not always easy to disentangle the empath’s intuition from its dark, data-driven analogue. Near the end of “Overthrow,” an executive at “Planchette” — Crain’s riff on the shadowy analytics firm Palantir — envisions a future where “no gesture goes unnoticed,” and “tactful” surveillance fits like a glove. “No one will feel watched,” he goes on. “But everyone will feel … appreciated.” We all know how this story ends, and it certainly isn’t with the universal refinement of feelings. But Crain’s novel reminds us that real sympathetic awareness — engendered by trust, courage and human proximity — remains our best defense against its weaponized digital double. “It’s a war of the senses,” Leif explains. “Over what we’re allowed to perceive, still.”

Image Reading “The Memory Police” is like sinking into a snowdrift: You tingle all over even as you freeze to death.

It’s a war that’s been lost on the bereft island of Yoko Ogawa’s latest novel, “The Memory Police,” where hats, perfume, green beans, birdsong and countless other entities have been stricken from perceptible reality. Translated by Stephen Snyder, the acclaimed Japanese writer’s fifth English release is an elegantly spare dystopian fable narrated by a novelist who hides her editor under the floorboards of her home office. He’s wanted for his immunity to the periodic “disappearances,” an incremental collective dementia that is reducing the island to “nothing but absences and holes.” Objects don’t vanish, exactly; people wake up knowing they are “gone,” and destroy them. Those who can’t forget receive a visit from the Memory Police, who enforce the disappearances by carting off families and eliminating contraband while betraying no signs of their intent.

[ “I always thought, no matter how my life changes, I want to have a life of writing. Whether I could make any money off it, I did not know”: Read our profile of Yoko Ogawa. ]

Reading “The Memory Police” is like sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful, it tingles with dread and incipient numbness. The story accrues in unhurried layers of coolly reported routine, as Ogawa’s narrator (the central characters are nameless) describes a life that is ordinary yet pockmarked with absence. She lives alone in her childhood home near the river, writing novels in her father’s old office or brooding in the basement studio where her mother, a sculptor, once entrusted her with forbidden keepsakes. “Ribbon, bell, emerald, stamp,” she writes. “The objects in my palm seemed to cower there, absolutely still, like little animals in hibernation, sending me no signal at all.”

That her memories disappear “right on schedule” provides no defense against the island’s authorities. The Memory Police regularly ransack her home, but only once they target her editor does she begin to resist. She conceals him in a secret room below her office, assisted by an elderly friend who lives on the rust-eaten ferry he once captained. The three form a makeshift family, conspiring in small domestic rebellions — holding a birthday party, for instance, after calendars vanish — as the island’s dissolution accelerates.

Often drawing inspiration from “The Diary of Anne Frank,” Ogawa’s fiction is celebrated for its exploration of loneliness, claustrophobia and caretaking’s proximity to cruelty. Her collection “The Diving Pool” features a novella about a teenager who seals a panicking toddler inside an urn, while her novel “The Housekeeper and the Professor” traces the relationship between a domestic servant and a mathematician with an 80-minute memory. It’s a conceit that “The Memory Police” chillingly inverts, by making two amnesiacs the protectors of a man whose mind is unimpaired.

Rarely has the relationship between author and editor felt more fraught with consequence. Writing with her first reader literally underfoot, Ogawa’s narrator struggles to complete her manuscript — a novel-within-the-novel about a captive typist — even as her inner resources deteriorate. The editor fights to revive her memories, a psychic drama that unfolds in exchanges even more rending than the novel’s scenes of totalitarian violence. Lemon candies, perfume, a harmonica — each disappeared object is a potential spark with which to reignite her consciousness.