SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa: https://t.co/00nZDvJYn7 Short Review: 8 out of 10— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) April 30, 2020
1/3
Short Review (cont): A dystopian Japanese novel originally published there in 1994, The Memory Police is an interesting look at the role of memory and ideas in building a sense of self and identity.— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) April 30, 2020
2/3
The Memory Police is a 1994 novel written originally in Japanese by author Yoko Ogawa. The novel was translated last year (2019) into English and received a lot of awards and noteworthy attention from mainstream critics - not just genre critics (honestly, genre critics were less interested in it). It's a short novel, not even hitting 300 pages, but still one that was seemingly loved by the english-speaking critic media even 15 years after it was first released.
And the Memory Police is certainly fascinating, featuring a dystopian scifi setting that one can easily use to draw parallels to parts of today's world. It's narrator, never identified by name, is a young woman on an island in which things - and the memories of those things in particular - begin disappearing, with a mysterious police organization policing the Island to ensure that those disappeared things are gone for good, and that anyone who still remembers is removed. As such, its easy to see how this novel could again be relevant in the current cultural zeitgeist, and the novel remains fascinating today for its focus on the importance of memory in making who we are.
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On an Island off an unknown coast, for years now, things have been disappearing. And when they disappear, the people of the Island burn or destroy what little of these things remain, with their memories of these things quickly fading away. Most of the people know things have disappeared - with some things being lost being the focus of their entire lives - but they cannot recall what those things actually were anymore. But some people can still remember - and these people are hunted by the mysterious and sinister Memory Police, who take them away, never to be seen again.
When a young woman novelist, whose mother remembered and was taken away by the memory police 15 years ago, discovers that her editor still remembers, she conspires with her only friend, an Old Man who lost his livelihood once the Ferry he once ran disappeared, to hide him in a secret room. But as more and more things disappear, the contrast between her editor and herself, forever losing parts of herself she is unable to recall, becomes starker, with only one possible ending seeming inevitable....
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The Memory Police is in some ways a dystopian novel about state control and dominance and other reviewers and critics have naturally made the comparison to 1984 as a result. And well it works as such, with the titular police coming to enforce that everyone gets rid of any objects that have disappeared and ensuring that anyone who somehow remembers is removed from the populace, even if by force in the middle of the night. When combined with how this book looks at memory and its importance in general, its certainly another strong entry in this type of genre, whereby policing memories essentially terrorizes the community until there's nothing really left of it.
But I think that look at this book kind of misses the point really? Unlike a 1984, this isn't a book taking aim at a type of practice clearly being practiced in one part of the world and taking that to a logical extreme - or if it is, it's not one immediately apparent (possibly because the book is 25 years old). But what the book is doing, unlike 1984, is really talking about the importance of memory - and it posits that remembering things is perhaps the key to who we actually are. The book tells this through essentially two stories that function in parallel and weirdly mirror each other: first, the story of our young woman narrator - who is never named in the text - who loses more and more of memories of things as the story goes on, despite the efforts of her editor whom she has hidden upstairs in a secret room and who remembers everything.
But secondly there is the story in the novel the narrator is writing throughout the book, a story of a young woman who takes a typing class from a man who becomes her lover, only to find one day she's lost her voice....and to eventually find herself locked in a room, seeming to fade away within it as she forgets all the skills she lost. It's a story that's a clear parallel to the story of our narrator itself, where the narrator is the one bringing food to a person locked in a room.....but unlike in the novel, it's the narrator, not the editor trapped in the room who is fading away.
In essence, by losing her memories of things, the narrator is the one trapped, fading away, even though she has the whole island to travel on whereas her editor is limited to the single room. The editor claims that the loss of memories is eroding everyones' hearts, and the story confirms that, with the memories and objects lost becoming more and more important to the narrator, until they become almost comical - physical body parts being lost last - and yet these more important objects and parts are just extensions of the lesser objects. A memory may not seem like a big thing to lose, but without them, Ogawa argues, we are not really ourselves.
It's a fascinating exploration of an idea I've seen elsewhere, and definitely worth a read.
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