Book review: 'The Memory Police' by Yōko Ogawa
On an island where residents lose their ability to remember the past, Yōko Ogawa's "The Memory Police" illuminates the fragile bond between memory and identity.
Source: Kawase Hasui, Wikimedia Commons
On a brisk winter morning, the residents of a nameless island wake to find that their memories of roses have vanished. Staring out from their windows, the petals that flow down the town’s river are nothing more than specks of red, pink and white; their scent and texture soon to become a distant recollection. Dispersed amongst the tides, the final traces of the flower are washed away; carried out to the sea, never to return again. This is all orchestrated by the memory police: an oppressive group of officers that remove the last vestiges of “disappeared” objects. Raiding homes and ridding the island of any surviving evidence, the ruthless police force will stop at nothing to ensure that all islanders forget.
For the novel’s protagonist, a writer, who, like the island is never given a name, this sudden disappearance is a common occurrence in her life. The significance of a perfume bottle or emerald is lost on her, though she hides these relics in a special cabinet away from the prying eyes of her neighbours and the omnipresent memory police. But for her editor, R, one of the few islanders who manages to remember every lost object, his ability to recall proves dangerous in a society where those who hold on to forgotten artefacts are taken away and removed from the island, much like the disappeared items. They too will become nameless things of the past. Determined to protect R, the small bunker the protagonist constructs under the floorboards of her house becomes both his home and a hiding spot. But while R’s safety appears secured in the confines of his refuge, the protagonist's fading memory means that her grasp on the world around her begins to wither away.
Yōko Ogawa’s novel “The Memory Police” hinges on this eerie concept; that objects, ranging from the mundane such as a ribbon to the meaningful such as birds, begin to dissipate from the residents’ memories, slipping away into a growing void of obscurity. How and why this happens, is never explained. As the narrator’s mother recounts, when a disappearance occurs, “you’ll feel that something has changed from the night before, and you’ll know that you’ve lost something”. The Japanese novel, which was first published in 1994 and later translated into English in 2019, has found its way amongst the ranks of seminal dystopian novels. Fans of George Orwell’s classic “1984” will be quick to draw comparisons between the memory police and the draconian thought police: the totalitarian zealots who stalk citizens that fail to conform to the regime of Big Brother. Aided by the ubiquitous telescreens and helicopters, the thought police rely on widespread surveillance to monitor and apprehend anyone who contradicts the political practice of Oceania’s government. Similarly, Ogawa’s book explores the concept of waning privacy, against the backdrop of an island where the idea of living behind closed doors is all but an illusion. The encroaching presence of the memory police creates widespread paranoia amongst the islanders who fear that all conversations and activities are observed. Much like the thought police in “1984”, very little is revealed about the memory police, only that their need to root out the few that retain their memory is unrelenting. Questions of who they work for and why they destroy any lasting evidence of forgotten objects are left unanswered.
Ogawa’s prose is economic and concise. Refraining from flowery, detail-heavy descriptions, the author presents each scene through a simple and seemingly withdrawn perspective. Ogawa’s rudimentary writing is perhaps indicative of the protagonist’s diminishing understanding of the world around her, as her ability to describe the particulars of everyday life begins to dwindle with every forgotten object. Memories of diverse wildflowers and rich cuisine are lost until all that’s left to appreciate is the lifelessness of the island’s desolate landscape. The emotional acuity of Ogawa’s writing finds itself in its simplicity and not in ten-page long accounts of a character’s lament for a lost object. Navigating each scene with a refreshing directness and an uncanny ability to describe events in a way that feels entirely believable, Ogawa manages to convey the complexities of grief and loss in a few short sentences.
Themes of oppression and resilience are explored from the very first page of the novel, though it is perhaps the metaphor of growing older and losing grip on the past, that is most prominent in Ogawa’s story. Much like patients suffering from progressive memory disorders, characters in “The Memory Police” become increasingly disoriented and develop an acute awareness that the control they once possessed over their life is gone. When the disappearances begin to take place more frequently and with a greater impact, the characters are no longer capable of carrying out daily tasks by themselves and therefore must rely on the few surviving islanders who retain their memory. But for those who are left unaccompanied, their suffering is in complete isolation as the world around them descends into a “thick fog”. The anxiety that comes with waiting for your memories to wither away and knowing that each day could erase something that you hold close to your heart, is captured astutely by Ogawa.
One of the most profound scenes in the book takes place in the narrator’s home, when she realises that her memories of photographs have disappeared. Staring at a group of pictures, including one of her deceased mother, the protagonist desperately tries to remember the history behind each image but finds “no memories (and) no response”. To her, the final traces of her departed parents are “nothing more than pieces of paper”. Even the word “photograph” will elude her. Knowing that the memory police will hunt down all photographs on the island, she burns each one until all that’s left to remember of her parents is a pile of ash. It is at this moment that the novel’s central message is thrown into stark relief: that the significance of an object is found in the memories we attribute to them. Lifeless pieces of plastic or metal are transformed by the narrative we weave around them and the memories that are born from using them. While the protagonist sees a box made of silver foil, R sees a harmonica. She sees a string of words, while he sees a story. Ogawa’s novel explores the role memories play in shaping our understanding of the world around us, but also the role they play in shaping our understanding of ourselves. With each lost object, the author describes the “cavity” in the characters’ “souls” that begins to grow, while their grasp on the world begins to shrink. On the nameless island where memories are laid to rest, the question that haunts every inhabitant - and the reader - is: who are we without our memories?