Review of “Memory Police” by Yoko Ogawa
Read 5/17/20. Spoilers ahead.
4.0 stars. As someone who has never been a fan of Orwellian-like tales, this one really wowed me. The translation is very clean; the language is beautiful in its quiet simplicity, lending the novel a sort of empty melancholy in its tone. Overall, I loved what this book represented, and it was the only oasis in this dry spell of books I've been reading.
First, I found that this feeling of detached awareness towards the fading memories to be especially key to the story that Ogawa wants to tell - because we are already R, we understand why he is so pained. By making the unnamed protagonist a writer, but one that is not immune to the Memory Police, the losses are felt deeper - not because the individual losses are painful, but precisely because they aren’t. There's something so tragic about these wonderful things in life disappearing without even whisper, but even more devastating is numbness. What's that quote? That the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference? That's the feeling I got from this book. The tragic part isn't the fact that the these objects are gone, because physically, they still very much exist, but in how memory here is presented as related to personal meaningfulness and relevance. The true terror is in how easy it is for these things to fade - the idea that "you don't know what you're missing until it's gone" is completely obliterated. Nonetheless, the quiet moments of happiness is where humanity and hope shone through, and there is an odd reassurance in that if this island were to disappear, that the existence of it and its inhabitants would still live on in the hearts of those that could still harbor memories. The idea of legacy, of leaving something of yourself even after your impression has dissolved. The world stuck in eternal winter has also reset, with the Memory Police now defunct and the inhabitants left as mere voices. And yet, R and the hidden room were never found. It's a bright future that does not take away from the bleak reality - culminating in neither a traditional good nor bad ending, but bittersweet.
I quite liked our unnamed narrator as well. She is smart and practical, and had a mental fortitude that made her capable regardless of fear. It touched me that she still could finish her manuscript despite novels having disappeared - another hope, that not all is lost. Even if the story she told was as bleak as the ending of her own life, there's an unfinished quality to them both that make them feel as though the conclusion is left on an upward note. Both the character of her novel, the girl who lost her voice only to lose her body, and our narrator, a girl who lost her body only to lose her voice, end their stories as still in the process of disappearing. Close to death, but not gone. I'm not sure what Ogawa intended, but I loved this ambiguity - where yes it seems that all is lost...and yet there is just the faintest bit that even if this cycle were to restart, perhaps an iteration of them would change course. After all, our narrator left behind a manuscript, and the character of that manuscript left behind her typewriter and so on and so forth. Who is to say that their existences were futile?
Moreover, I found the lack of explanation for the world to actually work in the favor of this book. The dystopian Orwellian novels that include tragic endings after the protagonists find the truth of their reality have never sat well with me. Instead, here it is almost the opposite - we don't know why the Memory Police are making objects disappear...and yet we don't need to. There will always be forces that seek to silence voices and control the truth. The Memory Police are not the enemy here - apathy is. I liked how normal this book felt, how the inhabitants on this island weren't out to get one another as slaves to the system, and that forgetting was so terribly easy. It makes the book have an almost timeless quality to it, because even years after its publication, the reality of its surveillance state setting can still very much exist today or tomorrow.
Finally, it must be said that the prose is lovely in this translation. There are sentences like “When I read your novels, I never imagine that your heart is hollow.” and “The moon and the stars were nowhere to be seen, as though they had been scattered by the brilliance of the flames, and only the corpses of burned books lit the sky.” A line I particularly loved was “He’s my editor. The first person who reads my work. He’s the friend who knows the self that I put in my novels better than anyone else” since it describes my book-friendships best (hello Amy). Perhaps I found so many of the themes included in the novel so compelling simply because the narrator was an author herself, so the book was able to touch on so many elements concerning what memory means to us. Although what is considered “memory” here is a loose, amorphous definition, I found that how the novel went about describing memory to be incredibly relevant to the essence of story itself. The application of mise en abyme worked wonderfully here as well, since the act of putting the narrator’s stories within the overall narrative further make it seem as though this has happened before and will happen again. Once more, we are reminded of the cyclical nature that is stories, life, and truth.
In all, I thought this book executed its fascinating premise quite well. Braiding an almost foil-like story within that of the main narrative allows the book to almost echo with its intent, back and forth as the protagonist struggles to put these intangible feelings into words. And it works - in reading the manuscript alongside the protagonist's situation, we get a glimpse into how trapped she feels even when she cannot explicitly recall why. While there was nothing particularly life changing about The Memory Police, I found myself encountering the multiplicity of layers it held while ruminating over its themes.
Do not let the simple way that the story carries out fool you. Simmering under the surface, under the skin, the story quietly blooms, as rose petals floating across a river.
