Review of The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

Dystopian fiction—a dime a dozen these days, right? Rising global temperatures, extreme right-wing governments, zombies, nuclear war, authoritarianism, and on and on go the list of speculative settings highlighting humanity's potential for disaster. But a dystopian setting that is not actually a dystopian setting—a dystopian setting that represents a deeper, non-human controlled aspect of existence? Let's get into Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police (1994).

The Memory Police tells the story of a year in the life of an unnamed woman. Living in a society ruled by the titular Memory Police, she must regularly burn items that have been decreed as forbidden—calendars, fruit, books, etc. are all made to disappear. The result is these items slowly fade from people's memories. But there are certain people whose memories do not die. Conveniently most are involved in art ((literary readers' radars perk up!). Such people are naturally anathema to the Memory Police, and are hunted by them. Thus it is that the main character comes to hide one such person in a secret room in her house. But can she hide him forever while she herself remains compliant with the seemingly unending list of forbidden things? Can she retain her sense of identity in a world in such enforced flux?

Such a plot intro would indeed seem to render The Memory Police as another dystopian novel. But such is not the case. Loss does not equal dystopian. Society loses things regularly—pagers, grammaphones, terms of address, fashion, and the list goes on and on and on, until we ultimately lose our lives. Loss is normal, known. Thus, while The Memory Police would superficially seem to be dystopian given the rate at which things disappear from the main characters world, it is in fact a representation of entropy and evolution. The memory police are a device, not setting.

The actual mode of The Memory Police is, interestingly, magic realism. While more realist than magic, there is nevertheless a vibe, an undercurrent of the surreal which lightly permeates the novel. Largely in the symbols and objects, the main character requires food, water, shelter, etc.—normal things, nevertheless with a strong slipstream flavor.

Thematically, The Memory Police is a paean to the written word. Featuring fiction within fiction, strong symbolism around typewriting, and a recurring theme wherein the written word is the only thing keeping memories alive, Ogawa would seem to shine a spotlight on the inherent value of the written word.

Bearing this in mind, The Memory Police does not address the elephant standing in its own theme room: the difference between written history (i.e. writing that keeps real events alive in humanity's collective memory) vs fiction (i.e. imaginative storytelling). The novel focusing more heavily on the fictional/artistic side, it constantly stands on the precipice of pretentiousness for not addressing the more objective side of written records or exploring its concrete representation in the setting.

In short, Ogawa was attempting an ambitious, literary novel. The devices and effects are pregnant with meaning—the disappearing objects, the publisher living in a tiny box, the old, unnamed man, emphasis on fiction and writing, etc. The tone is deliberately distant. Yes, the reader does have access to the main character's emotional state, but the linkages between said devices and effects are never explicitly laid out (e.g. where Big Brother's moves were linked to power and control, the Memory Police have no overt motivation). The logic behind the society in which they live is never explained. I know zero about Ogawa, but overall The Memory Police feels like a burgeoning literary writer's attempts at writing something transcendent and profound. To a degree this is accomplished, it's only the book's proximity to pretension that is occasionally concerning.