"Hat, ribbon, bird, rose.
To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.
When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn't forget, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?” - Taken from the blurb
Originally published in 1994, 2019 was the first time The Memory Police had been translated into English. This was so exciting for English publishers as the Japanese author, Yoko Ogawa, received so much praise for her original works and beautifully written stories. This was definitely hyped up by so many publishers, and I was so excited to get stuck into it!
This novel - I’m not going to lie - took me 10 weeks to get into. In all fairness to the story, the events are fed to readers slowly and then all at once, progressing bit by bit. This is kind of ironic considering the ending, but we will get to that in a bit. I took my SWEET time reading this as I found the story a little slow compared to a few other books I had not long previously read, but once I got about 150 pages in...things got weird and I was hooked!
[Spoilers Ahead!]
So beginning with...well, the beginning...our narrator does not have a name, however, we do know she is female and a novelist. We are on an island (Japanese I am assuming, but due to the story’s ambiguity the island could be anywhere) and now and then certain things tend to disappear.
Now by “disappear” I don’t mean they just vanish, the objects or creatures, or whatever it is, still exist, but its meaning doesn’t. For example, calendars disappear, meaning no one on the island remembers what anything related to calenders means. People still have birthdays but no one remembers when they are, there is no Monday or 25th December, there is just today, tomorrow and yesterday. So what happens to these things that disappear? Well, they must be removed, or the Memory Police will have to take action.
Some people are arrested by the Memory Police, sometimes because they keep things that have disappeared, and sometimes because they cannot forget. The Memory Police control everything the island remembers; birds disappear, so the Police burn everything that resonates with birds. The narrator’s late father used to be an ornithologist and studied birds, so as you can imagine, his office was filled with notes and information about all types of birds. The Memory Police discard all of this information, leaving nothing for the narrator to remember him by (not that she really remembered what these notes meant anyway).
This may sound confusing, however, this is just the beginning! The ending of this novel has so much meaning behind it; as more and more things disappear, so do the island’s residents’ body parts. First their left legs disappear, they wake up and do not recognise that this growth on their body is something they have been using their whole lives - I mean come on, you recognise your right leg but not the thing next to it that looks almost exactly the same?
Bit by bit, everyone begins to disappear. This is referenced throughout the story as the narrator confides in her friends that she is worried about losing herself and “what if [she] disappears?”. I believe the message behind this story has something to do with loss or grief, and perhaps allowing political authorities to take away everything that makes you unique and different. The story cuts off every now and then to the narrator’s own novel she is writing, about a student typist who loses her voice. This could possibly be the narrator’s reflection of herself - I mean, write what you know - which foreshadows the ending as only her voice exists until even that too is gone and she has become nothing.
Confused? I don’t blame you. I mean, how can someone forget how to use their legs? But I think there is so much more to it than that. R, the narrator’s editor and eventual lover, is in hiding in between the floor-boards in her house, due to the fact that he can’t forget the disappeared things and the Memory Police will take him away or kill him if they find him. He quickly becomes vital to the narrator’s sanity, helping her to remember certain things like music boxes and perfume. In addition to this, the two have an affair - he has left his wife and his young family to live with the narrator - suggesting that the desire to remember something forever is strong for our narrator.
Once she loses everything she has cared about, the whole island starts to lose pretty much their whole selves. Only voices remain until there is nothing. They believe themselves to have vanished but I guess they will just die there? I have no idea, this is such an ambiguous ending which is partly why I really enjoy it; is there a hidden message? Did everything really disappear? Who are the Memory Police? How much power do they have over which things disappear? So many questions, Yoko, please!
What I can say about this novel is that despite taking a million years to read it - my bad - I eventually really enjoyed it. It was quite profound and definitely one that I will be thinking about for a long time (hopefully longer than it took me to read it).
All in all I am giving this book a star for its profound content, a star for the writing as Ogawa’s style does not lose something when translated (at least I don’t think so), a star for the idea for the story itself because I feel it was quite clever (and I bet a lot of you are still trying to figure out what “their legs disappeared” means), and I guess a star for its gripping nature (yes my attention span is selective, but when I got further into it, I couldn’t put it down!)
★★★★☆
Get the book here!
Commenti