The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Review of The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated into English by Stephen Snyder and Markus Juslin
“Men who start by burning books end by burning other men.”
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (2018). Published in English by Pantheon Books.
I’d meant to read this book awhile ago, when it first came out in English in 2018. I knew about it before it was properly translated, because bits and pieces of quotes and phrases that were translated would float around in my corner of the Internet.
The Memory Police came out in Japan in 1994 I believe, which means it’s actually been around for quite awhile, and I found it remarkable that it took so many years for it to actually be translated properly into English.
And wow, before I get into this review, I must say that this is a book that really forces you to take a step back and look at the objects you’ve surrounded yourself with. What does it mean to suddenly lose photographs in your life and not care? If you had to burn all of them tomorrow, how would you recall your dead mother’s face?
These were the questions I was grappling with, especially as this was a time when I was converting my room into a minimalist haven and throwing out all the objects I deemed unimportant. Really forced me to take a second look and meticulously take record of what was and wasn’t.
Anyways, onwards with the review!
Content
The premise of this book is absolutely fascinating. We have this divide of the people who can remember the objects that are disappearing, the people who are quote-on-quote normal and are capable of forgetting, and the Memory Police.
The Memory Police add the most tension to this book, because we are constantly on edge thinking that our narrator and the old man are unable to hide R, the narrator’s editor, away from the Memory Police properly. Our narrator is a novelist, until the novels go away. R is the editor of her manuscripts, but he has the ability to remember, forcing him to go into hiding in the narrator’s house. The old man is a family friend, one who used to run the ferry until boats were forgotten, and helps this little smuggling operation go on.
My main gripe with this novel is the fact that we don’t really build enough in this world to get a context about what’s going on. The Memory Police are seen in the beginning of the novel coming after our narrator’s father’s friend’s family, the Innuis, and are asking them to come to the headquarters and work on a genetics experiment. They then choose to go in hiding agains the Memory Police in a safehouse, where they will now live out the rest of their days in fear like so many others.
But we never truly can understand who exactly the MP are and what they’re doing—we clearly understand that they’re trying to make the memories disappear, and there’s a slight implication that they might be doing eugenics and experiments to try and make this happen, but then we never hear about it again. Perhaps we’re limited in the way that we’re stuck in the first person narrative with someone who forgets, but it’s quite frustrating.
What makes a good dystopian novel in my opinion is that we have the solid foundation in which we know the villains. We know what they’re standing for, have faces to names. But the Memory Police just exist to be brutal and enact force upon the people living on the island. Perhaps there’s something critical I’m missing here, like the fact they are faceless and nameless. They are everywhere, a memory of fear falling you wherever you go. But the everyday people just accept it and move on, just like their memories.
I firmly believe the strengths in this novel lie in the questions that it raises, especially within the story-within-a-story method. When the people are forced to forget birds, fruit, novels, they follow these orders with compliance. Our main character, who is a novelist, throws all her books to the bonfire when it’s time to forget what a novel is. Although she still forces herself to write, it’s painstaking, a slow, laborious process that takes months. It makes you wonder about her lineage, as her mother is depicted as someone defiant and most likely kept her memories.
Her mother smuggled items that were forgotten by the people around her, like ramune and a harmonica, by hiding them in the sculptures that she made. The cost was her life—after the MP took her mother away, her corpse was given back after a week. We then have a story the novelist wrote, but was left unfinished, about a woman slowly losing her voice, bringing parallels to the world she is living in herself but isn’t understanding.
But R is the true narrator towards the end. He wants the old man and the narrator to feel a twinge in their heart as they eat ramune or listen to the harmonica. He begs the narrator to continue onwards on her novel, saying it mustn’t be left unfinished.
But he must watch, as his own body withers away in the darkness, how these people around him are forgetting and incapable of caring. They are losing what makes them human in this world now ravaged by snow and earthquakes, becoming husks. And that’s what they become: nothing. They have lost everything that gave them purpose in this world. But the things they forgot are still real, and that’s what his final promise is at the end of the final. To remember the tragedy that has occurred.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a good novel, but I wish certain aspects of it were fleshed out more. We needed more world-building than what was already done, giving crucial context to the MP and why the world they’re living in is the way it is. For example, we get a scene in which our narrator drinks drugged tea, but it’s never brought up again. Why do some people remember and others forget?
At the end of the day, in a philosophical way, it seems like a parallel to reality, how some turn a blind eye and other carry the burden with them. This also isn’t a very exciting book and is quite predictable, but the charm is in the characters and their interactions with each other. That’s what kept me going. I recommend the book though if you really want to have an existentialist crisis and think about life and the way you interact with people and things.
