The Memory Police
This week, a new novel, Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. This story was originally published in 1994 in Japanese and then translated to English and re-published in English in 2019. The book’s title was re-done; the Japanese original translates to Secret Crystallization or Quiet Crystallization which, as we will see, has meaning (so does The Memory Police). The novel was nominated for a 2020 Booker International Prize and a 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature.
We live in a time when all books must be “like” something else for marketing purposes. For the same reason, they must also fit into one- or two-word genre description. The Memory Police is slotted into Science Fiction, Dystopian Fiction, and Psychological Fiction, and the publicity notes claim, "Ogawa's fable echoes the themes of George Orwell's 1984, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude…” More scholarly folks compare its style and themes with the work of Franz Kafka and The Diary of Anne Frank—a favorite book of Ms. Ogawa’s youth.
‘Kay.
“A fable is a short fictional story that teaches a moral lesson, usually featuring animals that act and speak like humans.”
I don’t believe there are any talking animals in Memory Police, but it does teach a moral lesson, although very subtly. It is not simple. More on this later, best B.
Memory Police is told in first person and simple past tense. The narrator is a young woman (twenties?) who is never named and lives on what she refers to as “The Island,” which could be Japan (which is an island) but this is never stated. The time in which the book occurs is also never stated; it could be the future or it could be some alternate reality.
Rather than present a summary of the plot and premise for The Memory Police, let’s rely on the author herself. Here’s the first page of the story:
“I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first—among all the things that have vanished from the island.
‘Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here,’ my mother used to tell me when I was a child. ‘Transparent things, fragrant things, fluttery ones…bright ones…wonderful things you can’t possibly imagine.
‘It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island. Things go on disappearing, one by one. It won’t be long now,’ she added. ‘You’ll see for yourself. Something will disappear from your life.
‘Is it scary?’ I asked her, suddenly anxious.
‘No don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t be particularly sad. One morning you’ll simply wake up and it will be over, before you’ve even realized. Lying still, eyes closed, ears pricked, trying to sense the flow of the morning air, you’ll feel that something has changed from the night before, and you’ll know that you’ve lost something, that something has been disappeared from the island.’”
Yes, this is a story about life in a mysterious society where classes of objects and beings—like books and birds—are suddenly disappeared, meaning they are not only confiscated by the Memory Police, who, in their uniforms and tactics, refer to real historical secret police groups, but all memory of them is also erased in people’s minds, and here, we certainly see a science fiction, non-realist slant. Certain citizens are immune to this “brainwashing” and stubbornly retain the memory of disappeared things. The Memory Police attempt to identify and arrest them, sending them to camps from which they never return. As a result, these people are sometimes sheltered by the people in the community, hidden from arrest. It is never explained why this disappearance is done, and there is no explanation of what mechanism is used.
The story’s first chapter is in largely imperfect time and has to do with the protagonist’s mother telling her about the disappearances. Her mother is someone who is able to remember what’s been lost. She says: “The island is stirred up after a disappearance. People gather in little groups out in the street to talk about their memories of the thing that’s been lost. There are regrets and a certain sadness, and we try to comfort each other…Soon enough, things are back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it was that disappeared.”
The protagonist’s mother dies when the protagonist is young, and in Chapter Two, her father is described. He was an ornithologist but also dies young. After his death, birds are disappeared, as are hats. The disappearances seem terribly arbitrary. The things disappeared are often objects of beauty and/or human delight so that their erasure creates a tragic sense of grimness and loss.
“The disappearance of the birds, as with so many other things, happened suddenly one morning. When I opened my eyes, I could sense something strange, almost rough, about the quality of the air. The sign of a disappearance…I spotted a small brown creature flying high up in the sky; I had just begun to wonder if it was one of the creatures I had seen with my father when I realized that everything I knew about them had disappeared from inside me; my memories of them, my feelings about them, the very meaning of the word ‘bird’ —everything”
There is no point in this story of exposition, and some readers will grow frustrated. At no time is there a section saying, for instance, “After an apocalyptic event, world governments became strictly authoritarian, and in an effort to retain order, the leaders discovered a technology where people’s minds could be controlled.” The disappearances of things, who is behind them, and how they are accomplished remain a mystery. As we can see from the above quoted passages, the story is presented through the perspective of the protagonist in a sort of memoir/diary style. As we get going, the novel largely consists of dramatic scenes that give us limited information as they are limited to the perspectives of the characters in them.
Is the story an allegory of what a society can be like under a totalitarian regime?
Sure, and we will get into this. Citizens who forget the way things used to be are much easier to control.
I think too the novel can also be read as a haunting depiction of dementia. I do not know if Ms. Ogawa was thinking of this as she wrote the book, but the idea of people losing portions of their memory strongly makes one think of old age—although in the book it’s not just the elderly who are afflicted.
Let’s stop there.
Till next time.
Comments