The Memory Police

"My memories don't feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear."

Imagine waking up and discovering your loved ones, the necessities, and freedoms of day-to-day living have vanished, one by one. Where sustenance becomes scarce, the conditions of living have devolved into a frigid, hollowed squalor, and where the protesting of such vanishings proves impossible due to your lack of remembrance of them ever existing. It in itself is difficult to fathom, but it's the life on an unnamed island where an oppressive regime has held its occupants and their memories hostage. Yoko Ogawa has created this barren totalitarian alter-verse in The Memory Police, where a young writer copes with a vacant livelihood and loved ones she can't recollect, this all as the world slips away. 

While attempting to regain a sense of herself within her writings, out unnamed narrator lives life in a limbo of fear and indifference. Fear is in the form of the shadowy Memory Police, a militarized force that dictates what is to be disposed, and erased from conscious in order to maintain control of the island's citizens. Those that thwart the disposal of, or resist to fall in line with the memory erasure are whisked away to never be seen again --- this a fate our nameless narrator's parents have endured. Indifference follows once these particular items --- whether its roses, birds, photographs or perfume --- are disposed or destroyed. Our narrator is aware of the absences of particular items, and can "feel" their absences upon waking up, but once the disposal or disappearance of such is gone, her concern, and sympathies about the losses ceases.

With haunting and understated pacing, The Memory Police draws a fascinating premise, as its world mirrors the real-life autocratic police-state regimes in North Korea and Russia, as much as arouses thoughtful 'cautionary' dialogue for Westerners about the preciousness of memory, and the dangers of censorship and corrupt surveillance operations. With these kinds of books we're always wondering how individuals can become ensnared in such a suppressive environment, and The Memory Police provides a horrible world that teeters away from fiction into reality, but somewhere down the line it becomes tangled up in its own philosophy and leaves with more questions than answers. 

Aligning this within an 'Orwellian' sense is using the author's namesake hot and loosely. The world building is too slack. The writing, eerie but tedious. The characters too vague to harness the madness of their surroundings. The "rules" of the faceless Memory Police, our main antagonist, are convoluted. We're not sure why this is even happening, what the rhyme and reason for particular items, particular people to suddenly drop from existence, and who/what is really making this happen. Does it matter? It's debatable. 

Good dystopian fiction doesn't always focus on the "why it became this way", more so on the "what should be done to push back and survive", but for me, it felt that Ogawa had a fantastic idea that outpaced her pen. She does capture the horror in the unknown, where the less said the better to heighten the mood of dread and fear, still, The Memory Police suffers from not knowing what it wants to be most of the time. Ogawa made the Memory Police malicious in some moments (snatching people up in the streets, storming into homes after politely knocking) or plain stupid (leaving behind the pets of arrested individuals, not checking bags, not looking under rugs for trap doors...) --- switching up the modi operandi all for convenience sake. I never felt that our heroine was in serious danger due to their inconsistencies. 

As for the "rules" of memory loss, Ogawa waffles there as well as she can't differentiate between knowledge and memory. She wants our narrator to feel connected to her absent mother and suspicious about her disappearance, or not feel any ounce of feeling about her at all. Or individuals will (spoiler) lose a limb and hobble, but still are able to recall the exact taste of disappeared candy. Pick a struggle...

The Memory Police succeeds in being a mood piece, more than a distinct plot. More a parable than a story. It might be imperative to not take this book as literal, that its sole function is to meditate on the essence of memory, ponder as a cautionary tale and apply it to our current events, but Ogawa has attempted to develop characters, not avatars, has set up a world that is supposed to mean something. 

I didn't know what to think of this once I finished. I felt hollow, cold after. I wanted explanations instead of an ominous open-end. I understand that there was a 'bigger picture' to behold in Ogawa's development, but there were particular elements that just didn't click with the harrowing message of memory keeping, and the devastation of its loss. 

The purpose of R is what I take the most umbrage with. Our nameless editor's only connections outside her fortress of solitude is a family friend, dubbed The Old Man, and her editor named simply R. R possesses a gene that allows him to remember memories and the purpose of the disappeared items. It is mentioned there are others on the island with this gene, but we're only privy to R's special trait. One day our narrator realizes R has this unusually special gene, and she gets the idea to hide him in a secret compartment in her home that she and the Old Man build for him. While this felt like the start of resisting the Memory Police philosophy, our narrator beginning an underground railroad of sorts for those with this special memory gene, but the purpose for hiding him just dissolved and became meaningless. More so the hiding of him evolved into a selfish need for our narrator as her and R begin a sad affair (groan), this while he has a wife and newborn child (double groan). Contact between R and his wife is (conveniently) sparse to non-existent, this by R or our narrator's or Ogawa's choice is any guess. It's vague.

R's quick willingness to abide by our narrator is also a bit sketch. At some points I wondered if R was a secret agent or an undercover Memory Police officer as his passiveness to having a child, a wife, a whole other life, and then sleeping with our narrator just seemed so...cavalier and forced. More of the same convenience for the sake of convenience. If only we would've known what was going on in R's mind, or explored a bit more why he up and decides to live with our narrator in such a way it would've added depth to an otherwise baseless relationship. 

While reading this, I was watching Netflix's The Haunting of Bly Manor (sooo good, well, up till the last two episodes...) which also deals with memory, death, and the devastating fear of not existing. The Memory Police doesn't quite explore such fears as intense or clear as Bly Manor did. The characters in The Memory Police ruminate, feel sadden, but feel hopeless to even change the course of their dictated fates, and that's possibly my most frustrating aspect of this book. The sort of passive attitude to things disappearing, the lack of resistance. Roses being washed down the river? Oh, how beautiful. Books being burned? Meh. A tsunami that wipes out your home? Shrug shoulders. Loss of legs, arms? Eh, it's whatever. I for sure thought with the harrowing scene of the book burning our narrator would react with seeing the last strands of her identity burned away, but she just...folds. This along with the discovery of her mother's statues where forgotten items were squirreled away, and the caper to retrieve other statutes, this in some small effort to continue her mother's resistance didn't result into anything but a whimper. Super frustrating. 

The International Man Booker Prize emphasized the reason for re-releasing and adding this work to its shortlist was to reflect our current state of division and a rise in authoritarian politics. Fine and dandy, but what I have seen in our current state is a resistance to the spreading of such oppression. Sure, here in America specifically we might be adapting to the "new normal" as the narrator does to loss items --- how can you feel pain, lost when you don't remember, never had it? --- but we're all not a monolith in accepting it, and the push against condoning dictatorial buffoonery has been seen as having the greater outcome (raise a glass of grateful to the Biden/Harris presidency!). Maybe if this wasn't the hellscape of 2020, maybe if I had read this back in 1994 when it was originally published I'd find something poetic and profound about alluding an authoritarian government to the disappearance of ones self, but I kind of don't? I want to see people pushing back till they can't anymore. Even in an oppressive dystopia, you have to give a sliver of hope, even if you plan to rub it out in the end. 

Also I didn't care for the narrator's novel woven into the narrative either. Something clever can be done when we take meta-surrealistic treks like this, but while it felt that Ogawa was making parallels with an autocratic society and an abusive relationship, it just didn't flow seamless. Instead it was intrusive, distracting, sometimes confusing (to where we don't know which story is the real one...) and almost redundant as the relationship between R and our unnamed narrator was already unsettling this without the need of having to read about a student-teacher relationship that morphs into a Rapunzel-esque exploration of sexual slavery. Ogawa tends to relish in bizarre, warped erotic relationships, as the first book of hers I read, Hotel Iris, dealt with a disturbing relationship between a young woman and a much older man. The trick is Ogawa's writing is so clean and beautiful that it hides the sordidness there, and its a skill she has, but it doesn't do much for the surrounding story development which remains wanting.

Handing this tedious book over to the Memory Police to dispose of...