Book: The Memory Police
Author: Yōko Ogawa (Japan)
Year Published: 1994
My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
StoryGraph Rating: 3.7/5
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This is my second book by Yōko Ogawa. The first one I’ve read, The Housekeeper and the Professor, touched me by it’s simplicity and poetry.
This one is no different. The story is set in a fictional island in which is common for everyday objects to simply disappear. One day is perfume, the other day is hats, the other is all the ferries. Every day when something new disappears the population of the island simply goes to the river to dispose of all the objects or burn them, since they no longer recognize them or have any memory of what they mean.
But there are those who simply can’t forget the disappeared things. I in order to make sure no trace of the objects is left, the Memory Police was created and starts watching the citizens’ every move.
“No matter how careful we are, we all leave behind little bits of ourselves as we go about our lives. Hair, sweat, fingernails, tears…any of which can be tested. No one can escape.”
The setting is dark and tense, but somehow Ogawa’s prose seem to float in the air. There’s such a delicacy in the way she describes the main characters and their relation to themselves that you almost don’t feel the weight that is hanging over all of them.
The perfect passivity and submission of the island’s inhabitants is so well set into the plot that you can’t help but feeling that that’s the natural response to such strange phenomena.
“But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance.”
And yet, it’s very telling of people’s mass behavior. How people, despite all the disturbance that the disappearances cause (one day even calendars and dates disappear), tend to go on living like nothing happened in order to fit in with the crowd.
But of course, there’s also resistance and those who are determined to keep remembering, despite all the risks.
“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.”
Overall this is a great read, and I can’t wait to read some more of her work.
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