Yoko Ogawa’s latest novel translated into English explores control of collective and individual memory under a totalitarian regime, reports Chris Bateman

What are memories? Is forgetting a form of loss? What remains when you can’t remember a feeling, is it gone forever? These questions are explored in Yoko Ogawa’s latest novel to be translated into English, The Memory Police. Following an unnamed narrator and her friends, we are taken into a world of fear and terror, where the everyday minutiae of living is constantly threatened by the eponymous Memory Police, the sinister regime whose power extends deep into the psyche, controlling collective and individual memory. Arbitrarily, they strip away objects from people’s lives, making them disappear so completely they are forgotten by almost everyone: one day books or calendars are “forgotten”, the next day it could be flowers and precious stones. They also remove people (much in the way that people were disappeared in the brutal regimes of Chile and Argentina amongst others), with individuals and entire families disappearing overnight. Such is their power that once something, or someone, has been disappeared, they quickly become forgotten, wiped clear like footprints on the shore after the tide. Under this constant menace, the novel has a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere, which is largely unrelenting. In this, Ogawa’s work is incredibly powerful, leaving the reader feeling stifled and fearful, trapped under the oppression.

Despite clear 1984 overtones, The Memory Police doesn’t feel particularly dystopian or even political. It is more like a musing on survival and how we attempt to get on with our lives when all around is tyranny and fear. The Memory Police’s role is the removal of everything we cherish and value, until all that remains is our innermost voice. This idea is coupled with our main character being a writer who, as a result of the oppression, struggles to hold on to her own voice (this is compounded by the narrator’s own short story about a typist losing their voice which unravels in fragments throughout).

The theme of forgetting is explored deeply here and presents an interesting technical challenge: how to describe the feeling of not remembering? How can you write the details of an absence, something that once was there but no longer remains or can be recalled? Ogawa handles this skilfully, somehow managing to draw maps of the forgotten, leaving us with blank landmasses of memories that were once there but have now faded. This forgetting, this sadness, is contrasted wonderfully in the moments when things begin to disappear. The imagery Ogawa uses to describe the end of something renders it ever sadder, somehow more shocking in its beauty: an entire river is chocked with rose petals as the people of the island are ordered to dump them in the water, ceasing to exist by the time they have floated away; the faint peal from a small boy’s finger nails as they hit the floor, being cut in a final and desperate act of love before he too has to go and be forgotten. These images strike hard as our characters try to deal with their lives being reduced to nothing, layer after layer, until barely anything is left.

Ogawa has cited Anne Frank’s diaries as a significant influence on this novel and in choosing to have her main character hide an at risk friend, concealing him in her home, is an obvious parallel. The idea that against the odds, words and memories can survive emerges here as it does from Frank’s diaries, with Ogawa’s observation that some memories “don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that germinate again if the rain falls”.

While not overtly political, The Memory Police does well in describing the utter banality of totalitarianism. Aside from the obvious and, in parts, shocking acts of destruction they inflict on the inhabitants of the island, we are well reminded how bland and utterly joyless life under such regimes appears to be. All of life’s pleasures seem removed, books are forbidden, decent food is almost impossible to come by and even birthday parties have to be planned with the greatest levels of caution. Added to this, Ogawa expertly builds an atmosphere of fear and paranoia that seems to permeate our main characters, burrowing deep into their psyches. Although this prevailing gloom can feel stifling at times, the focus will occasionally shift, allowing us to breathe easier for a few moments as we gaze on some old leaves “floating in the remaining pooled water of a switched off fountain” or at the pages of a book fluttering in the air as it is thrown out the window of a burning library. These flashes are reminiscent of Primo Levi’s Moments of Reprieve, tiny, fleeting instants that allow you briefly to forget the terror all around you.

The Memory Police largely trades in terror, paranoia and fear of power. However, what makes this such a wonderful novel isn’t all the horror and brutality, but how Ogawa introduces brief snapshots of tenderness, love and longing. In these moments, emotions come rushing in over the shoreline with all the might of a tsunami, washing away everything in its path, absolving us, if only for a few seconds before we are brought back to the horror of the present. In this novel, fear is all around, yet beauty, hope and the human spirit will always strive to remain.  

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa and translated by Stephen Snyder is published by Harvill Secker.

Chris Bateman
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