The Memory Police
by Yōko Ogawa
A tale about an island where vanishing is ordinary, and remembering is dangerous.
“And what will happen if words disappear?”
From the island, things tend to disappear. Usually, there are a few weeks between every disappearance. Whenever one occurs, the island's residents wake up in the morning—“eyes closed, ears pricked, trying to sense the flow of the morning air”—and something feels off. The air is dense, weighted. They gather outside and wonder aloud, until someone points out what it was this time.
Birds, roses, calendars, hats. Ships are gone. Photographs no longer exist.
When something disappears, so too will the residents’ memory of it, and then their memory of it disappearing. Before they forget, it’s up to them to make sure they eradicate every trace of the thing they can find at home.
Let’s say, on the day birds disappeared. They fly off, leaving the observatory in shambles, and you own a few pictures of birds. If you don’t destroy them, The Memory Police—oppressive enforcers of a regimen of disappearance—will raid your house, destroy any evidence of birds, and load you and your family into a truck to be taken away. It’s unclear to where, but all anyone knows is you never return.
The day the birds disappeared was straightforward, as they all flew away. Photographs were difficult. Fruit, too, was easy: “a pattering sound could be heard everywhere, and in the northern hills and the forest park, fruit came down like a hailstorm.”
The (unnamed) narrator is a novelist. She has two friends: the old man, a former ferryman who lives on a forgotten boat, and R, her editor. R is one of just a few people who never forget. He remembers that which disappeared, and for this he is in danger of being taken by The Memory Police—a fate that befell the narrator’s mother in the past, when she was taken away, presumed to be murdered. When the narrator learns R cannot forget, she concocts a plan, and the old man helps her build a hiding place between two floors in her apartment, where R must take residence.
He hides, leaving his family behind. The space in which he now lives is tiny, with hardly any room to move. All he does is little administrative jobs on behalf of the narrator, or he polishes her spoons, reads and edits her work. She cares for him, in secret. Cooks his food when supplies permit, brings him water, speaks to him through a makeshift intercom. And, she works on her novel.
She writes about a woman who loses her voice and can only communicate through her typewriter, as taught by her typing teacher. Ogawa has interspersed her own novel with fragments of that of her narrator, who writes them to make sense of what’s left of her world. Her previous three works all revolved around disappearances, too.
As the narrator’s world shrinks, the mystery of the disappearances remains, which can feel unsatisfying. What struck me when I first read this novel a few years ago, was the lack of outright anger. There’s a persistent undercurrent of unease and fear, but never the outrage you’d expect to accompany the injustice of life disappearing without a trace, under the watchful eye of a regime.
For a while I thought this was a shortcoming. Upon rereading it now, I realised it must be a translation of the forgetting. A slow numbing to the injustice inflicted upon a population, just as The Memory Police intended.
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
First published in Japan in 1994
Translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder
Published by Pantheon in 2019
