the memory police
Yoko Ogawa’s 1994 dystopian novel explores what happens when a society gives up and gives in to loss—and what role stories have to play in keeping the resistance alive.
By Inez Tan
For generations, the residents of a mysterious island have woken up to find that they’ve lost their memories of certain objects overnight. The unnamed protagonist recounts on one such morning, “I spotted a small brown creature flying high up in the sky. It was plump, with what appeared to be a tuft of white feathers at its breast. I had just begun to wonder whether it was one of the creatures I had seen with my father [an ornithologist] when 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.” Whenever an object disappears, the entire community participates in removing all traces of it from the island—releasing birds from cages, scattering roses in the river, setting fire to their calendars. Their actions are overseen by the Memory Police, an intimidating, heavily armed regime that enforces the disappearances and the arbitrary rules that govern them.
Certain people, however, are immune to these collective amnesias. When the protagonist, a young novelist, discovers that her editor is one such person, she hides him in her house to keep him safe from the Memory Police. But the situation hits home for both of them when the time comes for novels to vanish.
“Novels have disappeared,” the protagonist argues with her editor. “Even if we keep the manuscripts and the books, they’re nothing more than empty boxes. Boxes with nothing inside. You can peer into them, listen carefully, sniff the contents, but they signify nothing. So what could I possibly write?” The burning of books by oppressive authorities that follows is an all too familiar scene. “No one can erase the stories!” a lone protestor cries, rather generically and to no avail as the Memory Police haul her away.
Stories might truly be one thing that the tyrannical powers of their world are unable to take away.
But Ogawa’s novel takes an unexpected turn when—somehow—the protagonist continues to write in secret. The implication is remarkable: perhaps no one can erase stories as long as people continue creating stories from their losses. “The stories have begun to stir again,” the editor says encouragingly, when the protagonist shows him the single sentence she spent a whole night to produce. “Your soul is trying to bring back the things it lost in the disappearances.” In a rare moment when the protagonist acknowledges the things she’s lost, she describes feeling like she has “a hollow heart full of holes”—a clear parallel to the empty boxes on the blank pages she struggles to fill, one Japanese character at a time. Writing stories, then, emerges as an image of defying the Memory Police—and stories might truly be one thing that the tyrannical powers of their world are unable to take away.
Nonetheless, the protagonist is still very much a part of a society that has internalized learned helplessness. Chillingly, we are shown that the same people who cooperate in the small, arbitrary disappearances of emeralds and perfume are quite willing to tolerate drastic food shortages when vegetables and eggs vanish. Over the course of the novel, we see how a society constantly subjected to privations becomes too weak to recover when disaster strikes. In the face of such overwhelming circumstances, what can one novelist do?
Novels, more than any other medium, can help us experience what it’s like to be another person, with all the richness of their inner life—their thoughts, emotions, and deepest beliefs.
The Memory Police has drawn comparisons to George Orwell’s 1984, whose recent chart-topping resurgence is testament to our contemporary hunger for stories about how people live through unjust political systems, censorship, violence, and trauma. Novels, more than any other medium, can help us experience what it’s like to be another person, with all the richness of their inner life—their thoughts, emotions, and deepest beliefs. Our yearning to understand the complexities of personhood helps to explain why novels have yet to disappear in this age of tweets, soundbites, and the flat, reductive narratives they traffic in.
But while The Memory Police contains interesting ideas, the characters only become flatter over the course of the novel, and their interactions amount to less and less. Like soup that’s been watered down, the story is thinned out by its own premise—that there simply are mysterious disappearances that cannot be stopped. Perhaps we would do well to recognize that we, too, will become flatter and thinner if we succumb to the narrative that oppression cannot be resisted, or the idea that laws must be followed even when they violate the higher principles that would grant every individual full personhood. As The Memory Police demonstrates, there is nowhere else to go once you’re stuck in the mindset that the protagonist maintains from the very beginning: “People—and I’m no exception—seem capable of forgetting almost anything, much as if our island were unable to float in anything but an expanse of totally empty sea.”
Inez Tan is the author of This Is Where I Won’t Be Alone: Stories (Epigram Books), which was a national bestseller in Singapore. A recent Kundiman fellow, she has won the Academy of American Poets Prize, and her writing has been featured in The Rumpus, Rattle, The Adroit Journal, Hyphen, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan and an MFA in poetry at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches creative writing. Find her online at ineztan.com. Instagram: @InezTanAuthor Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ineztanauthor/ Twitter: @InezTanAuthor
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder, is published by Penguin Random House, who graciously provided a copy to our reviewer. You can find more information and purchase the book at the publisher’s website here.