The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Title: The Memory Police
Author: Yoko Ogawa
Translator: Stephen Snyder
Published: 1994
Type: Fiction
Pages: 274
“But what if human beings themselves disappear?” …
“You have to stop worrying about things like that. The disappearances are beyond our control. They have nothing to do with us. We’re all going to die anyway, someday, so what’s the difference? We simply have to leave things to fate.”
In Brief:
A chilling, surrealist dystopian story with a fascinating premise, but I often found the writing clunky and disappointingly difficult to get into.
Rating: 3.8
Synopsis:
The Memory Police is set on an unnamed island where objects disappear. These disappearances often happen overnight, and the inhabitants wake up with a sense that something has changed. Slowly, they realize that an item has been disappeared from their memory, and as a collective, they destroy any remaining vestiges of what’s been forgotten. Roses disappear, as do birds, boats, and maps – citizens are stuck on the island. Enforcing the disappearances is the Memory Police: a brutal, anonymous force that searches through the island to make sure any evidence of disappeared objects is demolished. They also hunt down the few citizens who don’t forget like the others, who are forced into hiding or must try to blend in.
The unnamed narrator of The Memory Police is a novelist whose mother was killed by the Memory Police. She writes stories about objects that disappear and is currently writing one about a typist who loses her voice and is kidnapped by her teacher. Her editor, called R, is one of those who remember, so the narrator and her friend, an old man who used to run a ferry before it disappeared, build a secret room under her floorboards to hide R from the Memory Police.
Beyond this, there isn’t much plot: the narrator and the old man worry about keeping R safe, have some close encounters with the Memory Police. The narrator and R develop a romantic relationship, though he has a wife and newborn child at home. Items continue to disappear from the island at an increasingly rapid pace. At one point, calendars disappear, and for the rest of the book, the island is stuck in constant winter. The room slowly accumulates small items that have been disappeared from the rest of the island – harmonicas, menthols, precious stones. R clings to these desperately and tries to make the narrator and old man appreciate them, but they remain apathetic, unable to apply any meaning to the physical objects they’ve forgotten altogether.
Where I’m At:
Given that I read this book at the same time I read the last two, I don’t really have much to say that I haven’t already described in my past posts. I read this book in quarantine, spending my time necessarily alone. Some weeks were better than others. It’s the chosen book for my next Open Phil book club, but we won’t be meeting for another few weeks so I wanted to write this while my memory (ha) is still fresh. I think my solitude added to the creepiness of the book. I certainly related to R, cut off from the world and isolated in his little room. When I put down the book and went for a run, I was thankful that I could at least do that.
Getting Into it:
Though I enjoyed reading this book, I often found it frustrating and came away feeling vaguely dissatisfied. I’ll be the first to admit that part of this is certainly bias – I’m used to reading mostly Western literature, and The Memory Police is firmly embedded in Japanese tradition. The pace, character development, and overarching plot structure are entirely different and far outside my comfort zone, as is the surrealist tone that permeates the book. (Dare I make a comparison to Murakami? Nope.) I wanted to connect it to magical realism, to my beloved Gabriel García Márquez, Exit West, or perhaps even The Underground Railroad, and although there were similarities, it wasn’t quite the same, which just made it something of a jarring experience for me to read.
The thing about The Memory Police is that it’s more about the idea behind it than the characters or the plot. The lack of a plot I was okay with – there’s a lot of exposition, and the book sort of becomes more of a picture of life on this bizarre island, and books like that can be very good. But, I had a harder time with my inability to relate the narrator, or particularly care about any characters. One of the main features of the citizens of the island is their passivity, just going along with what’s happening as if in a haze, never really bothered. Though the narrator, old man, and R clearly care for each other, not much time actually dwells on their emotions or feelings, and they seem to just go through motions out of necessity. When the narrator and R begin a romantic relationship, there was little to make me root for them – they had little apparent chemistry, and R’s wife and newborn child were still waiting for him, hoping it might one day become safe for him to come back.
I do wonder how much of this might have to do with translation, as well as perhaps a cultural difference in the style of the novel. I particularly hated the way that characters spoke in the novel, it felt so stiff and unrealistic to me:
“When I was a child, I was drawn to the mystery of sleep. I imagined it as a land with no homework, no bad meals, no organ lessons, no pain or self-denial or tears. When I was eight years old, I was thinking of running away from home. I no longer remember why… I decided to run away in search of the land of sleep.”
Who talks like that?
These complaints aside, the idea of the book really was enjoyable to explore and consider, as was likely the point. Though I sometimes wished for more explanation, a why and a who, Ogawa’s decision to leave these questions unanswered allows the reader to compare the story to the real world. Taking a step back from the characters and plot, the book can be read as a highly political metaphor for state control. It doesn’t adhere to one moment in history, but reflects the many times people have been forced to give up their possessions, livelihood, even identities by a fascist, authoritarian force. You can’t help but think of Anne Frank in the annex, the brainwashing and propaganda in North Korea. You consider how people go about their daily lives under hardship and loss, and how some make courageous decisions despite unbearable circumstances – not so much to overcome or make a political point, but simply to be good.
I’m not entirely sure who I’d recommend this book to. It’s certainly odd. I will say that although it was published in 1994 it was only translated to English in 2019, and the timing seems telling. With today’s politics, there’s a lot anyone might recognize in these pages.
