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Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, originally published in Japan in 1994, has become available to the English speaking world by way of Stephen Snyder’s recent translation. This novel is a richly textured indictment of authoritarianism and anphilosophical meditation on the nature of memory. Through simple allegorical device, Ogawa creates a world in which memory is something that can be acted upon by outside forces, where characters are made to forget objects or concepts upon the drop of a hat. While the novel is certainly about disappearance and loss, it is perhaps more concerned with creation, and what it means to weave something out of an empty space. There is the obvious parallel here with novel-writing, and thus the book takes on a meta-dimension, considering what it means to remember and record.
On an unnamed island off of an unnamed coast, our unnamed narrator is living alone and working as a novelist. The island has been taken over by an authoritarian force called the Memory Police, who have tasked themselves with disappearing objects and concepts that they deem unnecessary. On some mornings, the inhabitants of the island wake up, and are plagued by a quiet disturbance in the universe. They then find out what object is disappearing, whether it be roses, calendars, birds, etc., and all of their associations with the object are lost, it becomes entirely meaningless to them, and they burn the objects in a mass bonfire. The Memory Police have tasked themselves with ensuring that each object has been totally wiped from everyone’s consciousness, and thus they are constantly conducting searches of private property, and questioning individuals who are believed to be in rebellion of this mass effort to forget.
Some individuals are immune to the disappearances, and are able to recall the functions of the disappeared objects. These individuals are of course the main target of the Memory Police. The narrator’s mother is one such individual, and was murdered by the Memory Police in the narrator’s youth. Our narrator is a novelist, who has published three books, and is currently drafting a novel about a typist who loses her voice and is forced to communicate by typewriter. Disappearance and loss are central themes of her novels, which seem very much informed by the loss of her mother, and the later death of her father, as well as her societal landscape. The the narrator finds out that her editor, R, shares her mother’s gift of memory, and she convinces him that he must hide from the Memory Police in a secret compartment in her home. With the help of her longtime friend, an old former ferryman (Ferrys were disappeared years before), the narrator hides her editor in a tiny room under her floorboards, serving him meals and giving him menial tasks to occupy his day.
The tiny room under the floorboards also becomes a repository for disappeared objects, which were preserved by the narrator’s mother in the sculptures that she constructed before her death. The narrator and the old man rely on R to remind them of the functions of these disappeared objects, and it becomes process of reinvigorating their memories. It is crucial here to point out that the objects being hidden in sculptures creates a direct relationship between art and resistance, positing visual art, in a similar way to literary art, as a mode of memory and thus activism. This connection is a central political statement of the novel, which offers art as powerful tool to resist authoritarian regimes.
One of the narrative’s most notable points is when novels disappear, and the narrator loses all of her ability to write or even to understand what she had previously written. As her editor pushes her to try to rediscover her ability to write, the only sentence she is able to eek out is, “I soaked my feet in water.” In just this brief sentence, Ogawa teases out some of the central themes of the novel: renewal, recreation, and a gentle attention to sensory details. This novel is masterfully understated, a rare nuanced and reflective consideration of philosophical and political quandaries that avoids the panic-inducing urgency of many novels with the same concerns weighing on them. Ogawa’s prose is quiet but textured, and The Memory Police is an illuminating work of magical realism that employs many of the most successful components of the genre to a magnificent effect.