The narrator's mother shows her a cabinet of disappeared objects in the riverside studio and explains how disappearances work.

Memory Police search the narrator's childhood home after birds disappear, confiscating and destroying all of the father's ornithological papers.

Memory Police take the narrator's mother away in a luxurious car after the family ignores her official summons.

The narrator drops her manuscript while watching Memory Police raid a safe house; a nearby boy helps collect the scattered pages.

Professor Inui's family arrives at the narrator's door late at night, fleeing a Memory Police summons.

Roses disappear across the island and the river fills with floating petals as neighbors gather to watch.

R reveals he can remember everything, detecting the faint scent of perfume in the narrator's mother's empty drawer.

The narrator asks the old man to help hide R, and they memorize and burn their planning lists together.

R moves into the secret room beneath the narrator's floor, leaving his pregnant wife behind.

The Memory Police take the old man away in a truck for questioning.

Calendars disappear across the island and continuous snow begins falling without end.

Novels disappear from the island and massive public book-burning fires are lit across the streets.

An earthquake strikes and a tsunami follows, destroying coastal houses as the narrator and old man watch from a hillside.

The old man dies from an intracranial hemorrhage sustained during the earthquake.

Left legs disappear across the island, marking the first time the inhabitants themselves begin to vanish piece by piece.

On an unnamed island, objects are erased from existence and memory by the authoritarian Memory Police, a pattern the narrator first learns about from her mother as a child. In the present, the narrator is a novelist whose mother has been killed by the police, and she makes a plan to hide her editor R—who cannot forget anything—in a secret room beneath her floor. She and the old man, a longtime family friend, sustain R's underground life as disappearances escalate from roses to photographs to calendars. A devastating earthquake and the tsunami that follows leave the old man fatally injured, and soon the island's inhabitants begin losing parts of themselves one piece at a time. The narrator's voice is the last thing to go, and in the end she disappears entirely into the room she built to protect someone else.

The island's vanishing world and the fight to survive it.

The narrator visits the old man on his boat; they share peach slices and retell memories to help preserve them.

The narrator's mother is returned dead a week after the Memory Police take her, accompanied by a letter the family cannot understand.

The narrator meets editor R at the publishing house and they discuss the Memory Police raid and the danger of genetic testing.

Professor Inui's family leaves behind several of the narrator's mother's sculptures and disappears toward an unknown safe house.

The old man visits the library to look for the narrator's books and reports they had all been checked out.

The narrator and old man complete the secret room in four days, covering construction noise by playing records.

The old man and R's wife establish a communication system using an abandoned elementary school's meteorological instrument box.

Photographs disappear from the island and R fails to convince the narrator to stop burning her entire photo collection.

The old man is returned from Memory Police questioning and reveals he was asked about people attempting to escape by boat.

Memory Police knock during a gathering in the secret room and nearly discover the hidden trapdoor while searching the house.

The narrator gets a job as a typist at a spice company after novels disappear from the island.

Sculptures left behind by the Inui family crack open after the earthquake, revealing disappeared objects hidden inside them.

The narrator and old man travel to the mother's ruined mountain cabin and fill bags with sculptures concealing forgotten objects.

Right arms disappear across the island and the narrator warns R that every part of her will eventually vanish.

R opens the trapdoor and leaves the secret room as the narrator's voice vanishes and she disappears into it.

Alongside the island's major crises, life on the island is sustained by small rituals and secondary losses that reveal character and consequence. The narrator shares peach slices with the old man on his boat, grieves her mother's violent death, and watches the Inui family vanish into an unknown safe house after leaving behind her mother's sculptures. R's hidden life deepens as photographs and fruit disappear, a makeshift communication system is rigged with his wife, and Memory Police raids keep every gathering tense. The earthquake cracks open her mother's sculptures to reveal forbidden objects hidden inside, sending the narrator and old man on a journey to the mountain cabin for more. By the time right arms vanish and the narrator warns R she will disappear entirely, the world has stripped nearly everything away, and R finally steps out of the secret room as the narrator fades into it.

The quiet losses and small acts of survival that shaped the island's survivors.

Birds disappear from the island and the narrator's father loses his job at the ornithological observatory.

The old man reassures the narrator that islanders' hearts grew thinner alongside the disappearances, keeping a kind of balance.

The narrator meets R in the publishing house lobby and lays out the plan to hide him in a secret room.

The narrator is assigned a new unnamed editor after R disappears from the publishing house without raising any suspicion.

All fruit disappears from the island's trees and the first snow in ten years begins to fall.

The narrator visits Memory Police headquarters to ask about the old man and is served what may be drugged tea by a senior officer.

The narrator retrieves a care package from R's wife at the abandoned elementary school, containing a drawing of their newborn baby.

R gives the old man a music box—a disappeared object—as a birthday gift inside the secret room.

Memory Police discover the narrator's forgotten datebook during a house search and burn it out the window into the river below.

After Memory Police leave following a house raid, R holds the sobbing narrator close and they kiss for the first time.

The narrator refuses to tell a stranger selling vegetables by the road the location of any safe house.

The narrator glimpses what may be the Inui boy's sky-blue gloves through a gap in the canvas of a passing Memory Police truck.

Memory Police conduct bag searches at the train station as the narrator and old man return from the mountain cabin.

The typist in the narrator's manuscript is silently absorbed into the clockworks room as her captor arrives with a new prisoner.

The narrator gives R her completed manuscript as her body continues to disappear around her.

The island's disappearances unfold through a series of turning points that reveal the true cost of memory, resistance, and love. The narrator learns early that those who remember—like her mother—are hunted, a lesson that shapes her later decision to hide R at enormous personal risk, even lying to a desperate stranger who begs for a safe house location. Small acts of discovery carry great weight: a music box reveals R's power to hold onto what others have lost, a datebook burning confirms the Memory Police's reach inside her own home, and a glimpse of the Inui boy's gloves suggests no escape is ever certain. In the narrator's manuscript, the typist is finally absorbed into the clockworks room, foreshadowing the novelist's own fate. The narrator's final act is to place her completed manuscript in R's hands before her body and voice dissolve, leaving only the written word behind.