Review of The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
guest post by DJ Dycus
One of the things I most appreciate in a novel is a story that helps me better understand human nature, whether it provides insights about myself, others in my life, or the world around me. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, although originally published in 1994 in Japanese and released in English in 2019, is prescient in the perspective that it offers us in today’s cultural climate.
The premise of the story concerns a group of people living in isolation on an island. With the appearance of the Memory Police, objects – as well as the associated memories of them – begin to disappear, one–by–one. The narrator recalls a conversation that she had with her mother as a young girl:
“Is it scary?” I asked her, suddenly anxious.
“No, don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t even 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.”
And that’s just how it happens. The first disappearance that the reader witnesses within the present timeframe of the novel is birds, which the narrator had enjoyed studying with her father, an ornithologist: “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.” If an object that the people have in their possession has been disappeared, like photographs, everyone gathers outside to burn them. But, strangely, there’s no sense of remorse or anger. Nearly everyone in the story simply accepts this forfeiture as a normal part of the course of their lives.
guest post by DJ Dycus
One of the things I most appreciate in a novel is a story that helps me better understand human nature, whether it provides insights about myself, others in my life, or the world around me. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, although originally published in 1994 in Japanese and released in English in 2019, is prescient in the perspective that it offers us in today’s cultural climate.
The premise of the story concerns a group of people living in isolation on an island. With the appearance of the Memory Police, objects – as well as the associated memories of them – begin to disappear, one–by–one. The narrator recalls a conversation that she had with her mother as a young girl:
“Is it scary?” I asked her, suddenly anxious.
“No, don’t worry. It doesn’t hurt, and you won’t even 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.”
And that’s just how it happens. The first disappearance that the reader witnesses within the present timeframe of the novel is birds, which the narrator had enjoyed studying with her father, an ornithologist: “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.” If an object that the people have in their possession has been disappeared, like photographs, everyone gathers outside to burn them. But, strangely, there’s no sense of remorse or anger. Nearly everyone in the story simply accepts this forfeiture as a normal part of the course of their lives.