The Memory Police

The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa, reads so effortlessly in translation that I'm reminded of beautiful moments years ago when I used to lose myself in Murakami.  This is beautiful writing of a Kafkaesque kind, and it flows like clear water. 

The plot is simple: objects are being forgotten, one by one. The forgetting is, however, categorical, imperative, and backed up by a brutal police force that constantly patrols the island upon which the novel's events are set, searching for backsliders: the ones who wilfully remember.  First calendars disappear, then novels.  When calendars are 'forgotten' time itself takes on new characteristics: it is constantly winter for the second half of the book.

When novels are 'forgotten' the main protagonist, a female novelist and her friend (the unnamed 'old man') cart a wheelbarrow of books to a conflagration in the middle of town where the whole community pitches into chucking books on the fire, which reaches skyscraper-like proportions.  Nearby the town's library burns down. 

The whole book is a comment on the nature of naming, language, and memory; politically, it comments on coercion and the collective power of forgetting. As in the Kafka novel, the hero is the individual who can stand up to what a damaging collection of individuals (a community, a state, a class) can decide to do to that individual. One comes to feel targeted, to take it personally, and one begins to resist, first in small ways and, later, on a larger scale that might begin to enlist others.

The 'other' here is the novelist's editor, who cannot forget. For some unnamed reason the editor, also metaphorically, does not allow himself to ever forget a single category of object that the police have placed on their list of the forgotten.  For this reason, the editor is given a special room in the novelist's house, hiding out like a Jewish person during a Nazi occupation.  The secret room is the site of much of the novel's most poignant, central, and emotional happening, from birthday parties, to readings, to physical bonding. 

Another main character in the trio of those to whom we come to care about in this very touching narrative, is the 'old man' who lives on a 'forgotten' boat.  The old man helps the novelist and editor to set up the secret room to be self-sufficient with toilet, teapot, ventilation, and communications ducts.  So many books have resonance right now because they remind us of 'lockdown' during the coronavirus, and this is yet another example. 

Read The Memory Police for how it sheds light on problems both old (around state violence and totalitarianism) and new (subtle but pervasive changes in societal norms that become entrenched).