The Memory Police

How do you feel after waking up? There is disorientation and irritability, and you're trying to remember what you dreamed about - but it all slips away. If you could distil that feeling of disorientation and grudging acceptance that comes when you have awoken and compressed it into a novel - it would be The Memory Police.
There's so much and yet so little to talk about this. You could say that the novel has its own Kafkaesque and Orwellian sense of prose and humour, true, but that would be doing it a disservice - Ogawa has her unique brand of melancholy that has to be seen to be believed.
Then again, many questions are left unanswered - how and where does this island exist? How was the technology for selectively discarding people's memories made in an environment where even aeroplanes and mobiles are not present? Why do some people remember everything? What is the moral, if any, of the story-within-a-story? Ogawa doesn't bother answering these questions, and for a good reason - her focus is on the characters more than the setting.
The characters are the fulcrum of the story - but the mute girl and the typing teacher, the Memory Police and the island have a life of their own. I think that is what Ogawa's entire point is, about how inanimate objects and sensations dictate our life. “Hole in the heart” and “hollow soul” are terms that repeatedly pop up when even something like calendars disappear - and I began to wonder if these weren't hyperbolic terms after all.
As a story, The Memory Police is amazing - but as a thought experiment, it is even better - I would rank it amongst the classics of dystopian fiction. Reading this amid a rewriting of history through politics around the world imbued me with a sense of nervous energy I didn't know I had.

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The concept was unlike anything I had read before but I feel it fell flat and maybe that was the point. Towards the end I found it confusing, the memories that disappeared, where they now physically manifesting to where those who remembered were forgetting too or did R just leave her body in the secret room? Was the novel she was writing the actual story? I'm okay with a book ending without answering all my questions, but I'm left not understanding what I read.

3.5
không hay như tưởng tượng hừm
vẫn là kiểu kinh dị yêu thích nhưng nửa sau thoại và cái kết sến quá nên không ấn tượng gì nữa, nhân vật mở đầu rất hay về sau vừa đọc vừa sốt ruột
chính ra cái truyện cô nhà văn nhân vật chính viết đọc lại thấy hay hơn cả, như thuộc về Revenge cái tập truyện mình rất thích
hay thời Revenge chính là peak về style này của cổ rồi :-?

There's a lot to say about this book. I went from enjoying it to not enjoying before landing on very much liking it.

Throughout reading this, I couldn't separate it from the atmosphere of the Pedro Costa film, Casa de Lava, which was also about an isolated island, death and isolation. While they were both very different, they align mood-wise quite well.

I noticed a lot of western talk about the book centered on it being “Orwellian,” a term I've grown to loathe in its overuse. I'm not sure this book was about big, sweeping statements or warnings about society as much as it was about the concept and process of creating art and coping with trauma.

Focusing on the “memory police” themselves doesn't quite connect the book's main narrative with the sub-narrative of the novel the main character was writing.

The novel was a woman who was defined by her typing and relationship with her abusive, controlling typing teacher until she lost herself completely. The main narrative was a woman living on a dystopian island who's entire existence was tethered to two men; the first an old man that was a family friend and a father figure, the second her editor, who ran away from his family to live in her basement to avoid this “memory police.” The relationship is different but... Sort of isn't, too. She's disassociating from the world around her but he's the “captive” of her fading memories who seems to legitimately care for her and wants her to be what she was before, which she cannot do. He's living in a small, hidden room in her home, while the character in her book was living in a hidden room above a church without her voice.

The main character's last remaining thing is her voice after the old man is gone.

These relationships with men seem to be the binding threads to me, moreso than jackboots taking things away. R won't let her move on, the typing instructor only wanted to violate her until he found a new toy. It's easy to read the typing teacher as a part of the publishing industry, elevating a “fresh, young female voice,” controlling it until there's nothing left, then replacing her voice with another to repeat the cycle.

The role of the protag's mother can't be discounted, either. R wishes her to explore that relationship and the loss of her mother, who left behind memories meant just for her, but had to be interpreted by R. After they find the last of her mother's gifts and she gives the lemon candies to the old man, it sort of seals off a part of her history.

Yeah, like I said, lots to think about.

What an odd book. The premise sounds enticing enough: a dystopian novel in which in habitants of a large island have to endure government enforced “forgettings” of every day objects. It's a terrifying premise in one sense. On any day, the citizens may wake up to see that their memories of something have been erased and everyone has to destroy destroy all of those items. They are made to forget birds, perfume, ribbons, emeralds, boats, etc. The Memory Police also terrorize the island, destroying what remnants of these items remain, as well as arrest and round up the requisite dystopian resistance movement and those that, interestingly, have a genetic difference that keep them from succumbing to the “forgetting”.

Fascinating idea, right? That's about where the interesting parts end. However, the last few pages of the book get so weird, are so unexpected, and leave you in a state of shock it ALMOST makes the book's shortcomings seem more intentional and of a whole. But first, let's talk about it's issues.

The narrator is flat and two-dimensional. She speaks of her past and longings, but only as much as moves the story along. The types of things an ACTUAL human in such a situation would recall and muse about never arise. Has she ever had a romantic feeling or dalliance before the time we meet her? Has she ever had a job in this society other than the books she writes? What does she cook? What does she know of the history of the island, it's government, etc? We never know. We hear about her parents and her schooling–that's about it, and we spend the entire time in her head as she muses about the world in which she lives.

She repeatedly does things for which there is no prior indication she would ever do. In the beginning she seems an incredibly passive “keep your head down, don't rock the boat” kind of character, and then in a moment she's building a secret bunker underneath her house to hide families and friends in this underground movement. There's no growth or thought or moment of crisis, decision-making, or being pushed to this. It just... happens, and there's no subsequent reflection on it.

Every other character is only flatter. Her editor that she hides away is a married man and they begin sleeping with each other. Do they ever talk about how they rationalize it? Or do they feel ANYTHING about it? No. She has a line or two about “needing” someone in all the stress. But that's it. Is there any tension or romance? No. But it's also not purely mechanical as people's humanity is stripped away in such a society. It's just a thing that happens a few times.

The plot is even more difficult to get through. It is slow and unexciting, and there are moments that are supposed to be “exciting” but it tries too hard with weak prose to build tension, convey “action” and it falters. There are SO many massive logical gaps in the way this world is structured. Now, in a sci-fi dystopian set-up, I'm find with not everything being spelled out or having an answer. It's fine to have just one premise and play with it. But at least let that premise itself be thought out for more than a few minutes.

This book's plot is filled with every single of the mundane and boring dystopian novel tropes, with none of the exciting ones. It has an underground resistance, a secret room, a dead parent who left behind clues against the “regime”, a visit to the government headquarters, a party by dissidents which is broken up by an unexpected visit from the police, the “tense” police search of the residence while the character sees the one thing out of place that could give them up, the character that seems to know everything about this regime and how to fight it, but didn't let us know that until way too late in the book, people sleeping together because they're just around each other, caricatured “evil” government officials that are just one-note brutes that have no coherent philosophy about WHY the government does what it does. So and so forth.

The more interesting tropes are missing, though: fighting against the regime (she's hiding a “fugitive” in her basement, but for what end?), learning more about how the world became this way, meeting up with the resistance, experiencing the arrest of our heroes and ushering them into the inner workings of this society, finding out what happens to rebels, discovering what all these scientists are doing once they're invited to work for the government, enjoying a philosophical sparring match with government officials over life, society, and what makes us human?

I do need at, though, that there is an odd mechanic employed here of a “novel with then novel”, that is interesting in its own right, though not much more so. The narrator is writing this novel and there are portions of the book that are excerpts from what she's written. They're interesting at moments, but not enough to turn this book around.

That ending, though. Really, it's just the last few pages, but it's so haunting, it's still with me days after finishing this. My concern, though, is that it almost seems like the novelist had this premise and this end in mind, and then just did a bunch of filler to get us there. This could have easily been a fantastic short story. I do feel duped having read this. The premise is exciting enough that you're like, “oh wow, I've GOT to see what she does with this!”

It's just sad that the answer is an overwhelming, “oh wow, not that much.”

Another example of a book's premise being far more interesting than the book itself. You live on an island where you wake up one day and something from your life has just vanished. The first incident in the book involves birds, so everyone woke up and suddenly the concept of “bird” holds no meaning. You don't remember what a bird was, you don't know what a bird is, all knowledge of “bird” is removed by the Memory Police. Holding onto past concepts like birds, flowers, calendars, is forbidden, and it's considered taboo to reminisce or talk about items that have been “disappeared”. As the book progresses, the disappeared items take the form of increasingly important and valuable things, and while disoriented and discomfited, the people are expected and encouraged to take it in stride and move on.

Certain people are immune to this, where they retain all memories and knowledge of things that have been disappeared, and if discovered by the Memory Police, these people are taken away and never seen again. Our main character is not one of these people, but does hide away her editor as he is one of these people. Romance blooms as romance does in books like these, and the editors tries his best to make the main character remember things that had been lost and realize how awful things truly are.

It's a very dystopian novel, and one without any real satisfying answers or conclusion. We never find out who or what the Memory Police act on behalf of, or why these things are being removed. I gather the novel is about how complacency is a creeping, insidious beast (the things disappeared start out innocuous and easily missed and slowly ramp up in importance and meaning as the story progresses), and that people should never just accept things as they are, but honestly the book came off boring and incomplete. This would've had more meaning if we had more reason to care about the people and their fate.

slow burn, the last 2/3 chapters were basically Endgame with characters disappearing. good writing but the pacing was not my forte.

A reviewer named Laura McGaha mentioned this article and it cleared up some confusion.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/how-the-memory-police-makes-you-see

Plus Lavka's answer in one of the FAQs made sense as well.

TWs: confinement, kidnapping, sexual assault, police brutality, natural disaster (aftermath of)

Time is a great healer. It just flows on all of its own accord.

What happens when you lose memories, the objects that once held meaning, and they all disappear?

Major props to the translator, Stephen Snyder, for providing such a translation that pierces and kept me going! In this odd situation, where objects and memories disappear one by one, with no explanation as to how it happens, the dystopian society provides immense tension as we follow the narrator and her story.

The opposites meet their fate at the end and leave it open for the reader, which may be frustrating. But perhaps there is still hope out there through what is kept hidden and safe.

Other quotes:
I clutched the packet and the envelope to my chest and started up the stairs, feeling the warmth of the old man's body still lingering in the objects.'Men who start by burning books end by burning the men.''Our memories have been battered by the disappearances, and even now when it's almost too late, we still don't realize the importance of the things that have been lost.'

Allegorically haunting

Themes of loss, death, and abusive relationships all swirl around the Orwellian-tinged Memory Police who enforce the rule: forget or suffer unspeakable consequence. Touching and haunting, the tale weaves in a story-within-a-story asking about the place that art has in the universe; will the story still exist when the mind that composed it has passed on?

Though I wouldn't quite label this Orwellian, The Memory Police certainly was haunting. 

Somewhere in the ocean off Japan, there's an island run by the Memory Police who can make objects (and people) disappear forever at a whim. One day there are birds, the next day they're ordered to be set free, and soon enough, the people of the island can hardly recall the word ‘bird' let alone what they looked like or any memories associated with them. Disappearances are a common occurrence and compliance is expected. Most people are able to erase their memories without effort. Unfortunately for those few who can't, it means their lives are in danger and they must go into hiding. Such is the case for R who is hidden by the unnamed narrator of the book. 

Lacking in world-building, we don't learn exactly how the Memory Police operate, only that they are stoic figures who think nothing of barging into people's homes and tearing the contents apart in search of disappeared items or evidence of resistance. We don't know how these people came to power, what their origin is, or how long they've been in power. It's been a while at least, and several hold out hope that they will someday be the ones to disappear. 

The story itself has a slow pace for a dystopian novel but it worked for me. Less focus on the technicalities of this universe allowed for a lot of attention on the characters. I especially loved the narrator's friendship with the old man. Their scenes were my favorite parts of the book. I also liked R's efforts to try and get the two to remember items they'd long forgotten, even if it's just one of the associated memories. 

The narrator is a novelist and some sections of the book follow the book she's writing. While these passages give a deeper look into the narrator's mind and how she's internalized life beholden to the Memory Police, I would have traded them for more world-building. So many questions go unanswered. Perhaps this is fitting for a book about people losing their memories (and in turn knowledge), however as a reader, it's difficult not to crave more build-up for a full understanding of the islander's lives. Nevertheless, the ideas of this book — manufactured memory loss — are too intriguing not to enjoy.