The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
I want to start by saying that this novel got me back into reading. Between work and writing, reading has taken a back seat in my life. I’ve started dozens of books this year but finished very few. I picked this book up, intrigued by blurb, and finished it in three days.
On the surface The Memory Police seems like an Orwellian piece of speculative fiction that criticizes fascism, and while it definitely does that, the deeper you get into this novel the more existential its themes become.
The novel takes place on an unnamed Island where things disappear - and when I say disappear, I mean literally disappear from people’s minds. It starts out small. Things like calendars, harmonicas, and music boxes are lost from people’s minds. The memory police come in and make sure that people have rid their homes of the disappeared items. The main conflict comes when we learn that some people do not lose their memories, they are able to remember everything that has been lost. These people are hidden away, kept in attics and basements and smuggled away from the island. The main character in this novel is a writer whose editor, R, is one of these people. Once she learns of his ability, she hides him under her floorboards.
I don’t want to get into the minute details of this book. What I want to do is tell you how amazing this book is. Grief and loss are the main themes of this book, the main character loses friends along the way and has lost both her parents in the past. We get long conversations between the main character and R about what it means to disappear, that although she cannot remember which each item does, she has distinct memories about her parents. She no longer remembers what birds are, but she has memories of her father sitting in the observatory watching and studying the animals. R says that she needs to grow her soul back, that she can still try and remember.
After losing my father last year, reading has been difficult for me. I want to read books about grief, but whenever I open them, I never finish them, like I’m avoiding facing that reality. I read fantasy and science fiction, they take my mind off things and give me enjoyable stories that are easy to read and get lost in. The Memory Police took my expectations and threw them out the window. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five was written in a similar way. Vonnegut wrote to cope with his trauma from the war, Ogawa wrote her novel to cope with loss and grief. Both authors used science fiction as a way to indirectly express their emotions on the page. The Memory Police came into my life at the perfect time. The themes of loss and grief and what it means to truly lose something are so subtlety done in this novel that you hardly know they are creeping up on you. This book surprised me and surpassed any expectations that I had. I recommend everybody read this book - if not for the themes, then for the prose.
