The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder and narrated by Traci Kato-Kiriyama, is a harrowing look at memory loss and trauma on a dystopian, unnamed island where the police ensure that the items that disappear remain forgotten. A young woman, whose father had been an ornithologist, saw the joy evaporate from his eyes when the birds began disappearing. She has since learned to live alone without her parents, write novels, and build relationships with a quirky cast of neighbors and teachers.
Unlike her mother who had been able to recall items that had disappeared, she struggles to recall the forgotten items. First the simplest things, but then who professions.
The woman thought her mother had been unique in her abilities, but it is clear that others can remember and the memory police begin raiding homes and taking residents away. The cruel Memory Police have no empathy for those who are suddenly jobless when their jobs vanish from memories and language. All objects related to these items and jobs must be removed from homes and destroyed or thrown in the river.
As a novelist, language and memory are intertwined with her stories. It is a way for her and others to remember the past without violating the law because it’s fiction. That is until novels are the next thing to be forgotten.
As I listened to this surreal and disjointed novel, I couldn’t help but think of dementia and Alzheimer’s patients and how these patients cannot remember things more and more, while remembering things that they may have buried in their own past. The disjointed unraveling is jarring and requires careful attention, as more secrets are revealed. These nuggets are like those memories that surface unexpectedly with a scent or when holding an item from childhood.
This forgetting, is a silencing. It’s traumatic. The effort taken to recall the forgotten can become exhausting and seemingly pointless.
One thing I notice with the audio was the repetition of phrases and words that increased the hopelessness these residents faced. There was an inevitability and incredible melancholy in the atmosphere, and the only light was a small hidden room in the narrator’s home. But that, too, becomes a place of sorrow.
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature, is a stark look at memory loss, how to cope with traumatic loss, and what we hold dear. It’s a novel I won’t forget.
RATING: Cinquain
About the Author:
Yōko Ogawa (小川 洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006, she co-authored “An Introduction to the World’s Most Elegant Mathematics“ with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.
