REVIEW | BOOKSWhat would you do if you had to hide your boss underneath your floorboards?
TEXT BY MAE HAMILTON
Forget Me Not
The words “contemporary Japanese literature” and “Haruki
Murakami” are hopelessly intertwined. And it might have some-
thing to do with the fact that his oeuvre has been translated into
50 languages. One might forget that there are other contemporary
Japanese authors.
Enter Yoko Ogawa. She’s a renowned author who has published
over 40 works and has been awarded every major Japanese literary
award in existence. Her latest novel to reach the West is an Orwellian
tale focusing on a nameless narrator living on a bucolic, but myste-
rious, island governed by a secretive militant task force known only
as the Memory Police. Once the Memory Police deem something to
be “dangerous,” which can be something as innocuous as perfume
or even birds, it vanishes completely from the island and the popu-
lation’s memory. Originally published in 1994, The Memory Police is
finally getting an English-language treatment 25 years later by pro-
lific translator and Japanese scholar Stephen Snyder.
The Memory Police begins like a nightmarish fairy tale with the
narrator recalling her mother telling her of all the “Fragrant, bright
... and wonderful things” that existed long before the Memory
Police came to power. Things the narrator “can’t possibly imag-
ine.” Her mother is one of the few people on the island whose brain,
for reasons that are never quite explained, remains unaffected by
the Memory Police’s tactics. Frustratingly, not much in the novel
is ever explained. The reader is left wading through a story with
13 O’CLOCK The Memory
Police is a haunting tale
of loss, but at its heart it’s
also a horror story.
Photo by Tadashi Okochi.many holes, trying to piece together a full narrative with what lit-
tle details there are of the island. But the holes aren’t the result of
poor storytelling; it’s just that many of the narrator’s memories have
been erased.
The novel unfolds from a first-person point of view, through the
words of our dear narrator. She’s a writer—considered a lowly job on
the island. Even though her words make up the bulk of the book, her
voice seems to take up little space with her diminutive, timid per-
sonality. She’s a lonely character, whose only friends are an elderly
male neighbor and her editor, who also has the same “dangerous”
condition as her mother. Even when the narrator offers to spirit her
editor away under the floorboards of her home to hide him from the
Memory Police, she’s too afraid to tell him how she really feels about
him. Her sexual frustration instead bleeds into her salacious novel,
fragments of which are sprinkled throughout the The Memory Police.
The novel-within-a-novel structure gives readers valuable insight
into a narrator whose very mind is governed by state surveillance.
The only place that she has to be free is on the page.
Despite the oppressive regime that the three live under, they find
small ways to rebel. They eat forbidden candies, try to remember
the scent of perfume and even throw a small birthday party for the
neighbor. But one day, he suddenly dies. After his death, the novel
progresses in a blur. Instead of focusing on the Memory Police or
her love affair with her editor, banal tasks of the narrator’s day are
relayed, and she seems completely resigned to her fate. This period
after death could have dragged on forever, stuck in a limbo. But, the
novel ends rather abruptly. One day, after the Memory Police decide
that bodies should be illegal, our beloved narrator simply fades out
of existence, with only her voice left echoing away on the emptiness
of the island.
The thing about The Memory Police is that readers might find
themselves at the end of the novel thinking, “Well, that didn’t really
go anywhere.” It is a haunting tale of loss, but at its heart the novel is
also a horror story. It’s a complex exploration into the smothering
weight of grief. What happens when one is called to rebel, but simply
doesn’t have the inner strength to? It harkens back to another puz-
zling work with an ambiguous ending—the original ABC series Twin
Peaks, and Major Garland Briggs’ greatest fear: The possibility that
love is not enough.Book cover courtesy of Penguin Random House.CM