The horrors of forgetting - told by a young novelist in company of an old man and her editor, one of the few people which are not affected by the island-wide “forgetfulness”. Whenever things disappear, people burn them, let them flow into the ocean or simply bury them, controlled by the memory police. 

Drawing on themes of literary dystopia and actual parts of the human history, especially fascist eras, the story is told in very simple prose. The more disappeared objects, the more hauntingly tells Ogawa of the surreal story about people loosing everything, until the last remaining humanity is nothing more than a faint memory of the poor souls left behind. 

It draws on the very real problem - that humans forget too easily. They forget their history, their lives, what they stood for. This is a quiet, serene, personal apocalypse, where attempts at resistance are small and which ends in the very destruction of the self, showing a dark future for all of humankind.