The Memory Police

By Ogawa Yoko

Translated by Stephen Snyder

(1994, translated 2019)

Random House

(Dystopian Novel)

Ms. Ogawa is also the author of collections of menace-laden short stories such as The Diving Pool and Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales. The Memory Police is a work of social science fiction set in a vaguely Orwellian dystopian world in a not-too-distant future. The people we meet inhabit an island enshrouded in fog. Periodically, something shifts. Neighbors go out in search of what has been disappeared. One time, it is birds, another, roses, another, photographs. The citizens dutifully burn or toss all of the disappeared objects into the river that rushes beside the narrator’s house. Regular sweeps by the uniformed Memory Police ensure that no one is concealing any of the offending artifacts. Citizens found concealing disappeared items are themselves disappeared. After a few months, citizens forget the names of the disappeared objects or people. The narrator is a single woman who lives alone in her parents’ home. She is a novelist and is only close to her editor, known only as “R” and a family friend, an old ferryboat captain. There are rebels, citizens whose hearts or brains are resistant to erasures; the narrator’s mother, a ceramic artist, was one. She was removed when the police found the disappeared objects she had saved up like treasure for her daughter. The other rebel is her editor. She and the ferry captain decide that they will try to conceal the editor under the floorboards of her kitchen in a small underground room. Ms. Ogawa was inspired by reading The Diary of Anne Frank: she was eager to capture an experience of claustrophobia, surveillance, and aloneness. The novel may reflect a resistance against Japan’s recurring efforts to rewrite its history of aggression and cruelty in the first half of the twentieth century, or it may be a commentary of how capitalism and globalism are slowly erasing what it means to be Japanese. However, it is hard to know if we are even in Japan. The island, its flora and fauna, the architecture, are all generic. If it were not for the occasional mention of “the Japanese style room,” the characters and townspeople might share more in common with the wraiths in the Greek land of the dead. They speak in whispers and accept losses passively. And although one might expect to see a fierce resistance, Americans brought up on Katniss Everdeen will discover that everyone in this world, especially the narrator, neither rage nor resist. The heroine seems to be tip-toeing through life very quietly, more or less resigned to accepting her powerlessness before the government’s creeping agenda. In the one instance where she demonstrates active concern for the ferry captain and appears to be off to confront the authorities and rescue her friend, she heads off to the offices of The Memory Police with jaw-dropping naivete. Her lack of self-awareness is only rivaled by the banality of the bureaucrats she meets; she leaves the station the next day without understanding that she accomplished nothing and having no idea that she may have further compromised her friend’s safety. It is important to note that Ogawa’s novel is clearly a post-tsunami work; in a nod to the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi disaster, the author’s island also is struck by an earthquake and tsunami. Later, it snows with increasing regularity, as if the island is experiencing a nuclear winter. Perhaps The Memory Police is a slow-burning protest against the Japanese government’s effort to conceal the truth about Fukushima and the long-range effects of the nuclear and natural double disaster.

“My father was dead, and the memory of the birds was gradually fading from the house.

The search had taken an hour and had yielded ten large bags. The office had grown quite warm from the bright sun that streamed in. The polished badges shone on the officers’ collars, but none of the men appeared to be sweating or suffering from the heat in any way. They shouldered two bags each and carried them to the truck they had left parked outside.

The room had changed completely. The traces of my father’s presence, which I had done my best to preserve, had vanished, replaced by an emptiness that would not be filled. I stood in the middle of that emptiness, feeling myself on the verge of being drawn into its terrible depth.”