Book Report: The Memory Police

31. Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police, translated by Stephen Snyder (1994; trans. 2019) (11/12/2020)

The Memory Police is the eighth book in Pete Turchi's series of discussions on the theme "Border Crossings." I skipped the seventh, Toni Morrison's A Mercy: it was too difficult; I wasn't in the mood to challenge myself; I'm too impatient, or maybe just too stupid. (In this link Pete discusses A Mercy. As he notes, sometimes you pick up a book, and it's just not the right time for it. I'm not sure it'll ever be the right time for me to engage Morrison, but at least now I've read a half dozen pages of her work. That's enough. For now, anyway. Maybe for good. She demands a willingness to go along and let things be revealed that I'm not sure I possess. But all that said, I did listen in on the discussion of the book by those braver and more patient than me.)

In contrast, The Memory Police was very easy to read, written in disarmingly plain language. It's speculative fiction, about an island where things are gradually "being disappeared"—things as commonplace as ribbons, harmonicas, and lemon sweets, but also roses and birds and ferry boats, calendars and maps, and eventually . . . well, over time, life as we know it simply seems to vanish. And along with the material objects, the islanders' memories of those things, and of the meaning that they represent in a lived life, also disappear. 

Braided into the simple account of the nameless narrator, a novelist; her friend "the old man"; and her editor, R, is a book that the narrator is working on, about a typist who loses her voice—not to laryngitis; she loses her very ability to speak out loud. Indeed, all of the narrator's books revolve around existential loss.

The Memory Police are the authoritarian regime's enforcers. They make sure that when, for example, novels are disappeared, all the people on the island set about burning their books. They also hunt down and arrest all those random few whose memories remain intact—such as R, whom the narrator shelters in a hidden room in her house. (The shade of Anne Frank is no coincidence.)

Throughout all these disappearances, the narrator and the old man continue to adapt, becoming more emotionally attached to each other, less materially invested in their past, while R continues to insist that the vanished items—many of which they are able to recover thanks to the narrator's mother, who was taken away and killed fifteen years before the story's events take place—will still be able to provoke memories. It is as if he simply can't conceive of a world without myriad specific and interconnected remembrances.

Nor can I. The disappearances, the stripping away of memories and meaning, that this novel outlines are horrifying.

And yet as I read, I wondered if, in some way, what is described isn't akin to death itself—cumulative little losses that we, perforce, adjust to as the fullness of life begins to recede. It's also a reminder to pay attention to just those small things that might not seem important, but what if they disappeared? Certainly—because we do have memories—we would miss them. They are all part of the fabric of our lives, our histories, our experience of the world.

Here is a passage I flagged. The narrator is visiting R in the little room that he has recently come to inhabit, and in which he remains throughout the book, never exiting:

"May I ask you something?" I said, still looking at him.
 "Of course," he answered.
 "How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?"
 "That's a difficult question," he said, using his forefinger to push up the frames of his glasses and then leaving his hand at his throat.
 "I'd imagine you'd be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things."
 "No, that's not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It's much like your memory, in that sense."
 "So you have everything inside you that has disappeared from the island?"
 "I'm not sure about everything. Memories don't just pile up—they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord. Though the process, for me, is quite different from what happens to the rest of you when something disappears from the island."
 "Different how?" I asked, rubbing my fingernails.
 "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."
 He chose his words carefully, as though weighing each one on his tongue before pronouncing it.

In August, Yoko Ogawa wrote a piece called "How We Retain the Memory of Japan's Atomic Bombings: Books," which Pete referenced for our discussion tomorrow—"retaining memory" of important events being crucial to the continuance of civilized society. 

And here is a good discussion by Jia Tolentino of The Memory Police, in conjunction with Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railway and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (the latter the first book Turchi had us read in this series), about the transformation of familiar metaphor into imaginative truth about the real world. 

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Today's Covid-19 statistics for Monterey County: 12,606 confirmed cases, up 72 since yesterday; hospitalizations and deaths remains steady at 727 and 103. 

Stay healthy. Be safe. Safeguard your memories too.