Snowballing Disappearance: A Review of The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

FOR THE READER:

Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police takes place on an island where items simply disappear, never to be seen or thought of again. Among the people who suffer these losses dwell a few who remember everything. These few are hunted down by the titular Memory Police, a gestapo-like organization who raid homes, scour for hiding places, and destroy with impunity.

At first, the disappearances are small and poetic: roses, with their petals becoming a beautiful cascade down the river as they are torn from the stems; perfume, with its purpose completely obfuscated. The disappearances hit closer to home when novels disappear, as the narrator of the book is a novelist herself.

There are three main characters in this world of disappearances: the narrator, a female novelist; the old man, who used to work for her family and now lives on a boat in the harbor; and R, the narrator's editor. When it becomes clear that R is one of the few who remember everything, the narrator and the old man devise a hiding spot for him under the floorboards of the narrator's home. This adds tension to the pattern of disappearance, as they try to keep R safe from the invasions of the Memory Police. R tries in vain to make the narrator and the old man remember things, gifting them disappeared music boxes, calling on them to un-numb the spots in their hearts created by the disappearances.

While the narrator tells the story of the island of disappearing things, she is also writing a novel in which a typist's voice disappears. This parallel narrative is sometimes fulfilling, sometimes distracting. When the typist's typing teacher locks her in a room with the lost voices of those who have come before her, it is a foreshadowing of what will come for the narrator of The Memory Police.

Eventually, body parts start disappearing, and the job of the Memory Police becomes easier, as it's impossible for people who remember to hide their whole bodies. More and more parts disappear, until finally the narrator tells R that he is free from the small room as the Memory Police have done their job and disappeared. She ends up in the small room herself, much like the typist in the novel she was writing.

The translated prose of The Memory Police is dream-like, visceral, and highly visual. The burning of novels and the tracing of rose petals down the river are images that will stay with me for a long time. As the disappearances grow, the ending of the novel seems inevitable, and somehow it's still a surprise.

FOR THE WRITER:

This book, in a lot of ways, reminded me of Donald Barthelme's short story "The School." It's a basic snowballing pattern. If "The School" starts with plants dying, you know it will end with humans dying. Similarly, The Memory Police starts with small disappearance and grows to bigger and bigger ones. The disappearance of everything that makes the narrator human is the only end of this book. When we engage in patterns like this, there is still the trick of making them fresh along the way. The Memory Police achieves that in a few ways. For one, the early disappearances are beautiful and poetic. The midpoint disappearances change the way the narrator relates to the world (a novelist losing novels). The later disappearances change the world itself, by dispersing the Memory Police themselves. When we follow patterns like this, from small to great, the way we do it is key. If this book just went along with one thing gone, then the next, it would not feel as fresh as it does in actuality, where each loss has greater impact on the world and the novel.