Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
Yoko Ogawa first published The Memory Police in Japan in 1994, under the title Hisoyaka na kesshÅ; Stephen Snyder’s translation bears a 2019 copyright. This unique tale recounts the strange goings on on a small Japanese island where things are forgotten. More accurately, I should state that things are “disappeared.” And the Memory Police administer people’s compliance with these orders in their iron-fisted way. If this sounds awkward, it’s because it is.
Our unnamed first-person protagonist is a woman in her 30s who is a novelist. Early on we encounter the process of when something is disappeared; the first memorable disappearance is roses. On a sunny morning, the stream outside the novelist’s home bears a curious series of brightly colored, uniformly shaped flat objects flowing on its surface. As people, including our novelist, approach for a closer look, it turns out that rose petals by the hundreds of thousands are floating along the stream, out to sea and oblivion. Immediately afterward, there are no more rose bushes, but the curious thing is, that the people accept it as a matter of course, shrug it off, and plant something new in the space.
Every once in a while something else “is disappeared” (Ogawa’s term for the odd occurrences). Not long after roses disappear, photographs share the same fate, and people, faced with having these odd pieces of paper with images they can’t place, simply burn them all. Not long after that, birds disappear, along with everybody’s memory of them. But: not everybody loses their memories. Rather than be rounded up by the Memory Police, these poor people with healthy memories have to live in hiding, fearing discovery. If the Memory Police find you and cart you off in one of their green trucks, you are never seen or heard from again.
The restraint with which Ogawa tells her tale chills us to the bone. Clearly the book contains strong elements of totalitarianism and people’s passive acceptance of its ever-more-outrageous depredations. But her novel also treats human memory, society, groupthink, and consciousness. The sheep-like population, including our protagonist, awaits its ultimate fate with hardly a whimper.
Also, Ogawa gilds her story with a novel within the novel — a surreal inversion of her main plot — which adds a frightening fillip to the lessons in the frightening main story.
Told in plain, almost gentle, language, The Memory Police posits its principal lessons for us all to see, and warns us in magisterial terms about bowing to the state’s bullying caprice. This novel will edify you with its through-the-looking-glass approach to modern life and particularly, life in a modern totalitarian state. I rode a roller coaster reading this, and ended up at a high point of appreciation: I had that frisson that I get when I come across reverberant, cunning, effective fiction — when the roller coaster came to a stop, I found myself at a high point of awe and tentative understanding. Read this book; take the ride I did, and join me at the sparkling, enlightened finish.