Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police, a Heartbreaking Tale of Memory and Control

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder, is a disturbingly modern dystopia about memory control. A young novelist lives on an island where seemingly random, everyday objects disappear from the citizen’s hearts, until they completely disappear from the public mind. Those who do remember are taken away by the formidable Memory Police, never to be seen alive again. When our protagonist finds out that her editor is one of those few, she concocts a plan to hide him away from the Memory Police. Filled with mystery and intrigue, the novel swept me away in its sad and philosophical wonderings, as we see the characters cling together in a sea of increasing austerity and uncertainty.

‘The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn. They drive me to burn things and I can only stop when everything is in ashes.’

The novel poses complex questions of memory and control, and as I read I found myself jotting down thoughts and questions about the relation between memory and emotion. The two are inextricably linked; to lose a memory you must lose it in your heart, and we see our main protagonist burn novels, her livelihood, with a tiny twinge soon dissipated by the beauty of the flames that fuel the hole left in her heart. Sentimentality is a strange kind of sadness, one that Ogawa manages to explore in a wistful, dreamy prose reminiscent of the feeling. But sadder still, is the protagonist’s lack of this emotion, leaving her to drift apart like flower petals without a stem. As disappearances become more dreadful, the inhabitants of the island simply adjust to each increasingly dramatic loss, reminding me of frogs in slowly boiling water – soon enough the most major of disappearances is simply accepted. As memories are more frequently vanished, the islanders become as light and unburdened as the island itself, like bubbles floating in the sky.

The novel is often reminiscent of classic dystopias such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Farenheight 451, as citizens are subject so surveillance, military presence, and increasing distrust of each other. However, Ogawa’s prose is more dreamlike and modern, allowing the novel to come into its own. The disappearances have almost a God-like omnipotence about them, as rose petals are blown away by the wind and fruit falls from the trees to be buried in a never-ending snow. Their mystery kept me reading to the very last page, unable to drag myself away from the question – why?

‘There, behind your heartbeat, have you stored up all my lost memories?’

The Memory Police pulled me along in its mystery, thought, and beautiful prose, dragging me from page to page as strongly as the rose petals were pulled out to sea. Except this book, the beautiful, thought provoking words I have read, cannot be forgotten. Although the prose occasionally slips into distracting monologues, Ogawa achieves an elegant, significant novel, and I have a strong feeling this will become one of the classics, taking its place among other timeless dystopias.