In Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, objects on a nameless island are made to disappear, and its inhabitants simply give them up. Ribbons, perfumes, photographs, emeralds, calendars, fruit. They dispose of their rose petals in the river. They release their birds outside; hesitating for a second, the birds fly into the clouds, and are never seen again.
Some of these things are sumptuous and luxurious. Others are mundane and nondescript. All of them are laden in their own way with human affection, and this significance is only revealed when they are given up. As rose petals are dumped into the river, the narrator describes how “... they seemed fresher and fuller than ever, and their fragrance, mixed with the morning mist from the river, was overpoweringly strong.” (46-7) When everyone releases their birds, they each say good-bye in their own way:
Some were calling their names, others rubbing them against their cheeks, still others giving them a treat, mouth to beak. But once these little ceremonies were finished, they opened the cages and held them up to the sky. The little creatures, confused at first, fluttered for a moment around their owners, but they soon were gone, as if drawn away into the distance. (11)
Not everyone chooses to surrender. The narrator’s mother, long ago seized by the memory police, was one of those who refused to forget. She hoarded forbidden objects in secret. On the occasions her daughter would discover them, she would have to explain their significance by drawing on hazy memories: that perfume was once used to make people smell nice, and that people would apply it to themselves before going on dates.
It is not just the objects themselves at stake. When they are abandoned, the memories associated with them also fade—and with those, a part of someone’s humanity. Handling one of her mother’s forbidden objects as an adult, the narrator learns that it is a music box. She listens to it everyday, hoping to find inspiration in it, but admits its lack of effect on her:
The melody that flowed from the box was simple but pure and sweet. That much I could feel. But I had no confidence that it would be able to check the exhaustion that was overtaking my soul. Because once it had been sucked beneath the surface of that bottomless swamp, it left no trace at all, no ripple, no fleck of foam. (194)
When novels are disappeared, the narrator—a novelist herself—vows to follow in her mother’s path and carry on writing in secret. Under the implied threat of abduction, she gets a new day job as a secretary and throws her books onto a public bonfire. As one book falls, the flap of its pages briefly reminds her of what a bird is. Yet as soon as the image fixes in her mind, the concept has already vanished.
With the loss of her precious effects and their associated memories, the narrator even loses the ability to write. It is only with the help of her editor—a man known simply as R—that she might relearn how. R is another one of those people who refuse to forget. To keep him safe from the memory police, the narrator puts him up in a hidden compartment in her house. Hermetically secluded from the world, R nourishes himself on those things which are everywhere else disappearing. He is hopeful that people might one day recover their memories:
Memories don’t just pile up – they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord... My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. (81-2)
R has an easy-going purity and confidence which contrasts to the fumbled despair of the narrator. When they communicate over a makeshift speaker, his tinny voice, transmitted from his hidden room, sounds like “a spring bubbling up from far below” (108). And when objects disappear, and everyone forgets what they are, R remembers everything.
On one occasion, the narrator observes how he touches and observes everything using “the same sort of care he used with my manuscripts.” (108) R is capable of discerning the stories that exist in all of our material effects, what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls Geschichte. Our use and possession of a thing impute something of our history and story to it, both in physical appearance—the abrasions and scratches of our handling—and in the memories we come to associate with it. When all tangible things are lost—when they no longer signify any part of our life—we are unable to anchor our sense of being within the world.
This happens in a very literal way in The Memory Police. Maps having long disappeared, the island, lacking any real landmarks, is of an uncertain size, and might as well be the entire world. When calendars go, the seasons escape comprehension, and the sky stays dark with endless winter. People lose their sense of time. They do not even have proper names. Like the anonymous souls of Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro, they are too insignificant to distinguish even themselves. Finally, their body parts vanish. The narrator merges into her decrepit surroundings, and becomes oblivion.
It is hard to know what to make of the eponymous memory police. My version of the book, translated by Stephen Snyder in 2019, describes this as a dystopian novel about state surveillance. Maybe Byung-Chul Han’s commentary primed my reading, but I didn’t get Orwellian vibes at all. The memory police—who they work for, what cause they serve—are just as blurry and unstable as everything else. Most of their violence is hearsay; the disappearances—which operate more like a force of nature, and just seem to happen of their own accord—are mostly self-enforced through conformity.
Byung-Chul Han reads this novel as a yearning for a dwindling world of tactile and emotional depth. There is a sense of entropy, a progressive devaluing and thus disenchanting of the world and the things in it. “What can the people on this island create?” asks the narrator. “A few kinds of vegetables, cars that constantly break down, heavy, bulky stoves, some half-starved stock animals, only cosmetics, babies, the occasional simply play, books no one reads... the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it’s completely hollowed out, we’ll all disappear without a trace.” (53)
I also see this book as an allegory for childhood and aging. Babies understand the value of what is being disappeared in an intuitive, pre-rational way. They delight in textures and sounds, selecting a few favourites as comfort objects. For my niece—who is not even a year old—a ribbed tin of baby formula and a crinkly packet of apple-scented anti-bacterial wipes give her that cherished familiarity. These things calm and assure her in a way nothing else does. And they are both to me utterly insignificant. I would not have thought twice about throwing them away.
Growing up entails a sense of loss. We yearn to return to our former bliss and ignorance, but we have no way of knowing if it was really like that, and lapse into nostalgia. Our only access to that forbidden world lies through the flawed mechanisms of memory, but just as words on a page can deceive, so too can memories which, in the process of being recollected, modify themselves. If there is, as R suggests, a way of retaining that childlike mode of wonder, it is not in the straight recollection of facts, but in the refined affect of human emotion. “Even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something.”