The Memory Police
By Yōko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (translator)
Publication Year: 2019 (first published in Japanese in 1994)
Type: Fiction
Genre: contemporary
Read on 2021-01-31
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2021 Reading Survey ➞
★★★★★
This book is kind of a nesting doll of allegories and allegorical literature. The main character is a novelist who starts off writing a romance between a typing teacher and student that sharply turns in the middle of her writing into a magical realist horror. That story, which is presented in excerpts as the novelist writes, is itself an allegory for the magical realist horror happening in the world of this book. In other words, the book serves as a frame for another book, and presents its own allegory in relation to another allegory. As both the main book and the book-within-the-book reached their respective climaxes, I was struck by the connections Ogawa draws between the complete abuse, subjugation, overtaking of senses/bodily autonomy, and Stockholm Syndrome experienced at the individual level (the story in the book within the book) vs. at the level of the authoritarian state (the story of the book). These are completely reflective of one another, and they resonate and echo in layered ways between the two books as well as between two of the major relationships/dynamics presented: 1) the typist teacher/abuser/captor and student/victim/captive, and 2) the novelist/protector/interlocutor and her editor/protected/isolated in captivity. Is the novelist describing herself as the abuser? Or the abused? Does she feel trapped by the protective role she must take to save her editor R from being taken away? Or rather, in spite of R being the one trapped in a small hidden windowless room, because the novelist is the one who continues to lose her memories at the hands of the Memory Police, she remains the one trapped.
By describing all these scenarios in these nested allegories, drawing all these rich, layered comparisons between individual characters, symbolic objects, political regimes, etc., Ogawa provides commentary on the totality of both interpersonal abuse and large-scale social-political authoritarianism.
The twin “disappearances” of the typist student and the novelist are the most starkly similar and comparable. Where the former is caused by being subsumed intentionally, insidiously, totally by her captor and abuser who’s sole aim is to steal first her voice and then all her other sensory experiences as he traps her in a clock tower, the latter is the result of state-mandated disappearing of first external objects and then eventually body parts until all that remains is her voice. The end of the typist is in a room, but the gradual disappearance of her autonomy also doesn’t take place until she is trapped in the room. The novelist primarily complied with the Memory Police (her main act of defiance being hiding R) throughout, showing a relative lack of autonomy in spite of the freedom of movement she was afforded. Instead of being herself trapped in a room, the room itself was slowly disappeared around her as the choices in her life were constricted with more and more disappearances and clear signs of societal collapse (lack of produce, materials). The novelist retains her freedom of movement almost until the very end, walking her dog in spite of the disappearance of parts of her body. She ultimately trades places with R, who himself had been going through a process of decay and decline in protective captivity. R’s ability to retain his memories of all the things that are vanished however transform the room into a repository for life and for freedom - or at least it’s memory, as the novelist recovers hidden objects and brings them to R. When the novelist descends the room one last time as her body is completely disappeared, it is implied that so to have all the other people of the island been disappeared, freeing R to ascend the ladder into the world once more as a free man unburdened by this lack of memory.
I think the book speaks to the importance of the little things in life - appreciating the flight of a bird, the sound of a music box, the taste of a candy. But it equally rings home the importance of memories of such moments, and the liberatory ability to remember joyous moments past. Maybe this can serve as an allegory for onset of disability, memory loss, old age. It can also speak to the totalizing, paralyzing feeling of depression, PTSD, anxiety.
