memory police essay

The Memory Police

48 pages • 1 hour read

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Before You Read

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-18

Chapters 19-21

Chapters 22-24

Chapters 25-28

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

The typist in the internal manuscript often foils and reflects Ogawa’s unnamed protagonist . How does the story-within-a-story structure develop our understanding of both characters?

Memory is said to be most strongly evoked by the sense of smell; however, Ogawa uses several different sensory motifs in relation to memory. How are one or more senses—like touch and/or taste—developed in the novel?

Nature, a common trope in Japanese literature, is prevalent in The Memory Police . How does Ogawa break with seasonal conventions, and what do these breaks reveal about the island?

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How “The Memory Police” Makes You See

By Jia Tolentino

About a decade ago, Seo-Young J. Chu, an English professor at Queens College, published a fascinating and omnivorous book called “ Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation .” In it, she argues that, contrary to appearances, science fiction is a mimetic discourse—that the “objects of science-fictional representation, while impossible to represent in a straightforward manner, are absolutely real.” Works of science fiction depict objects and phenomena from our world that are “nonimaginary yet cognitively estranging,” she writes, such as the sublime, or “phenomena whose historical contexts have not yet been fully realized,” or events, such as trauma, that are “so overwhelming that they escape immediate experience.”

Chu notes that the world is becoming more cognitively estranging. “The case could be made that everyday reality for people all over the world has grown less and less concretely accessible over the past several centuries and will continue to evolve in that direction,” she writes. “Financial derivatives are more cognitively estranging than pennies. Global climate change is more cognitively estranging than yesterday’s local weather.” If you’re on board an eighteen-hour flight from Singapore to New York, you have multiple plausible answers for simple questions—where you are, what time it is. Science fiction offers a way for these confounding systems and experiences to “acquire proportions that the muscles, nerves, and sinews of our bodies can recognize kinesthetically.” Chu compares the bloodless term “global village” to Isaac Asimov’s planetary city of Trantor , where forty-five billion people live under a single human-made structure. Science fiction, she writes, can “de-cliché” a figure of speech.

I turned to Chu’s book recently because I was trying to get a handle on a device that I had encountered in a handful of novels, one that I found consistently affecting. The first time I’d noticed it was a few years ago, when I read Colson Whitehead’s “ The Underground Railroad .” The novel performs a kind of double transmutation: a long time ago, a complex real-world system —the network of white abolitionists, free black people, and Native Americans who helped slaves escape North—had been converted into the simple metaphor of a railroad; as Whitehead built his novel around actual tunnels and tracks and boxcars, the metaphor was converted back into a set of physical, albeit imaginary, objects. The vividness of Whitehead’s book, and its propulsive sense of thrill and adventure, spring directly from this literalization—from the fearsome puffing trains that carry Cora, the novel’s enslaved protagonist, toward freedom.

A few years later, I read Mohsin Hamid’s “ Exit West .” In this novel, something similar was at work. It addresses a current reality: the complicated, arduous journeys that migrants take around the globe, trying, like those who travelled on the Underground Railroad, to escape death and persecution and move toward liberty and prosperity. No one term could denote all that these journeys entail—smugglers, bribes, boats across the Mediterranean, barefoot walks through the Darién Gap. We simplify the situation by speaking in terms of entry points and gateways. In “Exit West,” Hamid makes these gateways literal: his migrants cross the world through a series of enchanted doors .

Broadly speaking, Whitehead and Hamid are working in the tradition of allegory. Allegory traditionally involves the embodiment of immaterial things: in “ The Pilgrim’s Progress ,” which John Bunyan wrote in the second half of the seventeenth century, the protagonist, Christian, flounders through the Slough of Despond and is pulled out by a character named Help. Another version of allegory cloaks actual people and events in fictional drapery: the nineteenth-century critic John Wilson termed this the “disguising allegory.” But, in Whitehead’s and Hamid’s books, nothing is being disguised, and what is embodied is decidedly material. These novels turn the reader’s attention outward, illuminating not just the nature of the Underground Railroad and of migration pathways, respectively, but of the world that necessitated and produced them.

The effect of the literal trains and the physical doors is to revivify concepts that are so much a part of popular consciousness that they have become abstract, almost generic. In “The Underground Railroad,” the physical details of the railroad are surreal in their mundanity. A skeletal station agent leads Cora into a barn, opens a trapdoor, and walks her down a steep stairwell to a small platform with a single bench. A dark tunnel, twenty feet tall and lined with train tracks, leads into the darkness. This is her first glimpse of the railroad; dazed, she asks the agent who built it. “Who builds anything in this country?” he replies. Cora realizes that this is what it looks like when the prodigious work of enslaved people isn’t stolen from them, “bled from them.” A train comes, black and sooty, with a “triangular snout of the cowcatcher” and a single ragged boxcar. Later on, in another station, Cora finds a set of crimson chairs, a table with a white tablecloth, a crystal pitcher, a basket of fruit. The tenuous workaday miracle of the Underground Railroad is defamiliarized and made immediate; the reader feels the sanctity of this decentralized system, in which even the most minor decisions and kindnesses of unseen individuals left permanent stamps on other people’s lives.

In “Exit West,” Nadia and Saeed, the protagonists, are able to escape a refugee camp in Mykonos because of a Greek girl who spirits them to an unguarded house with a secret door that leads them to London. The doors condense the metamorphosis of migration into an instant: “It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and like being born, and indeed Nadia experienced a kind of extinguishing as she entered the blackness and a gasping struggle as she fought to exit . . . trembling and too spent at first to stand.” Hamid writes that the existence of the magical doors brings a “ twinge of irrational possibility ” to the sight of ordinary doors, turning them into objects “with a subtle power to mock, to mock the desires of those who desired to go far away, whispering silently from its door frame that such dreams were the dreams of fools.” Just like that, the refugee’s situation is intimately close at hand—the agony of seeing roads everywhere, watching planes fly overhead, and knowing that chance has made it so that you, unlike so many others, cannot travel where you please.

Both of these novels also borrow from the tradition of magical realism: as in the works of Gabriel García Márquez or Haruki Murakami , the novels are so flush with detail that their slipstream elements can be folded in undifferentiated. “The Underground Railroad” is set in the eighteen-fifties, roughly, but Cora encounters, in South Carolina, a twelve-story building and a massive sterilization conspiracy akin to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. These phenomena seem just as realistic as the yams she digs up in the plantation to take as fuel for her escape. In “Exit West,” Nadia orders hallucinogenic mushrooms from the Internet, and their appearance in the form of an ordinary package seems no less fanciful than the sudden materialization of a Tamil family on a beach in Dubai. These novels fit into the category that the Stanford professor and critic Ramón Saldívar calls “speculative realism”—literature that deploys the fantastic in the process of turning “away from latent forms of daydream, delusion, and denial, toward the manifold surface features of history.” Both invoke magic to suggest not that the world is magical or ineffable but, rather, that it is knowable, and that it ought to be known.

Earlier this year, Pantheon Books published Yoko Ogawa’s masterly novel “ The Memory Police ,” in an English translation by Stephen Snyder. (It was published in Japanese in 1994.) It’s a dreamlike story of dystopia, set on an unnamed island that’s being engulfed by an epidemic of forgetting. In the novel, the psychological toll of this forgetting is rendered in physical reality: when objects disappear from memory, they disappear from real life.

These disappearances are enforced by the Memory Police, a fascist squad that sweeps through the island, ransacking houses to confiscate lingering evidence of what’s been forgotten. Otherwise, Ogawa’s forgetting process is fittingly inexact. Things tend to disappear overnight; in the morning, the islanders—“eyes closed, ears pricked, trying to sense the flow of the morning air”—sense that something has changed. They try to acknowledge these disappearances, gathering in the street and talking about what they are losing. Sometimes the natural world complies, as if in a fairy tale: as roses disappear, a blanket of multicolored petals appears in the river. When birds disappear, people open their birdcages and release their confused pets up to the sky. Less poetic objects—stamps, green beans—vanish, too. Ships and maps are gone, so no one can leave or really understand where they are. A period of hazy limbo surrounds each disappearance. There are components to forgetting: the thing disappears, and then the memory of that thing disappears, and then the memory of forgetting that thing disappears, too.

The narrator, who, like the island, is unnamed, is a novelist. Her mother, a sculptor, was murdered by the Memory Police, who regularly round up and disappear the few islanders who still have working memories, and her late father was an ornithologist. (He dies five years before birds disappear and is spared the sight of his life’s work being carted away in garbage bags.) The narrator has published three novels, all of which revolve around disappearance: a piano tuner whose lover has gone missing, a ballerina who lost a leg, a boy whose chromosomes are being destroyed by a disease. Throughout “The Memory Police,” she works on a novel-in-progress about a typist whose voice is vanishing. She’s processing reality through a metaphorical device, re-creating the mechanism of the book that she herself is embedded in.

The narrator spends much of her time with an old man, a former ferryman who lives on a boat that now registers to them only as an unusable object. “I mean, things are disappearing more quickly than they are being created, right?” she asks him. She goes on, “It’s subtle but it seems to be speeding up, and we have to watch out. If it goes on like this and we can’t compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it’s completely hollowed out, we’ll all disappear without a trace.” The old man says yes—when he was a child, the island seemed fuller. “But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow,” he says. Ogawa expresses this attrition in the novel’s unembellished language and the eerie calm that pervades it—as the novel progresses, you feel as if a white fog is slowly thickening. On the island, possibilities are becoming foreclosed both literally and spiritually. When the residents forget birds and roses, they forget what these things conjure inside them: flight, freedom, extravagance, desire.

Allegories of collective degeneration have a tendency toward the phantasmagoric, as in José Saramago’s novel “ Blindness ,” which was published in 1997. In that novel, all the people in an unnamed city lose their physical sight, and the place swiftly descends into hellish depths of degradation and despair. But one of the most affecting aspects of “The Memory Police” is the lack of misery in the narrative. At first, this feels comforting, moving—an assurance that life is worth living even in the most reduced circumstances. The narrator adopts a dog that’s left behind after a kidnapping; she spends days gathering small treasures to throw a birthday party for the old man. The two of them take care of each other, and they protect the man who edits the narrator’s novels: he still has his memories, so they help him to hide from the Memory Police in a secret compartment in the narrator’s house.

But then it begins to seem possible that despair itself has been forgotten—that the islanders can’t agonize over the end that’s coming because the idea of endings has also disappeared. The narrator asks her editor if he thinks that the islanders’ hearts are decaying. “I don’t know whether that’s the right word, but I do know that you’re changing, and not in a way that can be easily reversed or undone. It seems to be leading to an end that frightens me a great deal,” he says.

I thought, then, about non-magical disappearances. We are often unable to conceptualize the true magnitude of certain inevitable losses. Even when regularly confronted with the most concrete and urgent sort of reality—that we have less than a year and a half before the planet’s climate is irreversibly headed toward catastrophe, for example—we tend, like the people in Ogawa’s novel, to forget. “End . . . conclusion . . . limit—how many times had I tried to imagine where I was headed, using words like these?” the narrator wonders. “But I’d never managed to get very far. It was impossible to consider the problem for very long, before my senses froze and I felt myself suffocating.” She finds herself, in conversation, “feeling that I was leaving out the most important thing—whatever that was.”

The fantastical is necessary to access the fullness of reality. Plato’s Cave helps us to understand human ignorance. Gregor Samsa waking up as a cockroach shows us what alienation can be. In 1981, the literary critic Bainard Cowan wrote, “Allegory could not exist if truth were accessible: as a mode of expression it arises in perpetual response to the human condition of being exiled from the truth that it would embrace.” When it comes to the situation of refugees, and to the conditions in which the Underground Railroad operated, and to the kind of repression that is imaginatively depicted in “The Memory Police,” we have, perhaps, exiled ourselves from the truth. These are not cognitively estranging phenomena in the manner of cyberspace, for instance, the technical workings of which most of us simply don’t understand. Statelessness and slavery and fascism may be complex, but, if we fail to fully see them, this is at least partly because we have chosen to look away.

These three novels that struck me so intensely—all of them science fiction, under Chu’s wide definition—had the ability to imbue these concrete realities with a weight and a radiance that held them out of the rush of time. “An appreciation of the transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory,” the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote. They’ve lingered in my mind in part because I often feel dulled by an endless accumulation of information, an onslaught of reality that precludes reality’s absorption. It can feel impossible to grasp the extent of the sufferings of others; we can consequently go blind to the ways in which individuals have mitigated and can mitigate this pain. Whitehead and Hamid and Ogawa make us look.

Books & Fiction

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By Emily Witt

By Rachel Riederer

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and the Dangers of Forgetting

The unnamed island of Yoko Ogawa’s novel, The Memory Police (originally published in Japanese in 1994 and translated into English by Stephen Snyder in 2019), is a hazy, unsettling place where things inexplicably disappear. The disappearances range from mundane objects, such as hats or perfume, to wildlife like roses and birds. The island’s residents always have a sense of when something is about to go, even if they never know what it will be. Whenever something disappears, the residents lose all affective ties, memories, and even understanding of whatever the object was. The disappearances have become such an integral, accepted part of life that each subsequent disappearance garners little response. Most residents accept the disappearance, discard the object if possible, then continue with their lives. If they are caught with disappeared objects or indicate that they retain memories, they are taken away by the Memory Police.

The unnamed narrator’s mother can remember every forgotten object and hides many of these objects in a chest of drawers hidden in their basement. When the narrator is a young girl, her mother shows her some of these objects, explaining memories attached to each one. But the narrator, who falls prey to the full brunt of the disappearances, feels only emptiness and confusion when she encounters these objects that should no longer exist. Eventually, the narrator’s mother is taken away by the Memory Police, too. The novel charts the narrator’s struggle against the disappearances and her desire to protect her editor, who can retain his memories like her mother, from the Memory Police as the island continues to fall into disarray.

One of the most striking images of the novel is the titular Memory Police. Most reviews of Ogawa’s novel focus on the fascistic function of the organization, remarking on the timeliness of the novel’s translation given the increase in global fascism over the last several years. It is impossible to ignore the echoes of Nazi Germany and the treatment of Jewish people that Ogawa draws on, especially regarding the Memory Police themselves and the loaded imagery of the cramped, hidden enclave that the narrator builds within her home to hide her editor. And those echoes are intentional. From childhood, Ogawa expressed a keen interest in The Diary of Anne Frank , even devoting two of her own books to Frank’s life—a book of essays, Recollections of Anne Frank (アンネ・フランクの記, Furanku no kioku ) in 1995 and a book for young readers, Visiting Anne Frank (アンネ・フランクをたずねて , Anne Furanku o tazunete ) in 2011. Ogawa visited the hidden annex in Amsterdam as part of her research, touching the things that once belonged to Frank herself, getting a sense of how bodies fit within such tight quarters.

But the heavy emphasis on the Memory Police themselves obscures the larger argument that Ogawa makes about the nature of storytelling and, in particular, about historical revisionism. Rather than situating the Memory Police as the true antagonists in the story, the novel instead points to the power of invisible historical processes and how human beings participate in these processes. The Japanese title of the novel is 密やかな結晶 ( Hisoyaka na Kesshō ), which roughly translates to secret or quiet crystallization. Unlike the English title, the original Japanese title does not focus on a specific group of bad actors but on a surreptitious, societal process underpinning the entire novel.

Emphasizing a set of individuals or an organization creates an out, someplace we can point to when we ask why injustice happens. How many times has police brutality been brushed aside as the actions of “a few bad apples?” How often do organizations fixate on specific instances of racial discrimination as a way to avoid talking about the huge systemic overhaul necessary to address historical inequality? How many diversity panels have been created to signal social engagement while maintaining the status quo?

The Memory Police are an easy target within the novel’s world; they do horrible things and act in frightening ways. But they do not seem to control the things that disappear. As the novel progresses, it seems they simply flow with the disappearances, using the situation to their political advantage. They reinforce the disappearances, ransacking houses and taking people away if they show signs of memory, but they are not an all-powerful entity. They are a striking red herring that catches our eye as the underlying process of crystallization continues unabated.

The fiftieth anniversary of World War II was fast approaching when the novel was initially published in 1995, which meant that The Memory Police hit the scene amid renewed conversations around Japan’s role in the war, especially when it came to atrocities committed by the Japanese empire and the nature of memory production. Japan has long struggled with acknowledging historical atrocities and its colonization of the Asian mainland and other countries in the Pacific. One of the most common refrains Japan has used as a nation to sidestep responsibility is to blame all wartime acts on the government and the military at the time. The general populace is thus painted as unwilling participants or as individuals duped into the wartime project. It is easy to brush off responsibility when it was those people back then who were “the problem.”

For decades after the war, there was outright denial from many quarters that certain historical events even occurred—such as the massacre of at least 40,000 Chinese civilians and the rape or mutilation of countless Chinese women, commonly known as the Rape of Nanking, in 1937. As Reiko Tachibana notes in her book Narrative as Counter Memory , “Japanese discrimination against other Asian peoples, especially Koreans, again rose to the surface [in the 1990s], and the government continued to censor textbooks that acknowledged Japan’s crimes in Asia.” Even today, there is heated nationalistic grandstanding from some quarters about the historical legitimacy of “comfort women,” young women and girls from colonized countries who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army, the majority of whom were from Korea and China. The discussions regarding official state apologies and reparations for these and other atrocities have reappeared as recently as January 2021. There are so many intentional gaps in Japanese history regarding WWII that many Japanese citizens aren’t even aware of these events. Or these historical facts are painted as propaganda pushed by enemies of the Japanese state and shouldn’t be believed.

It’s within this historical milieu that Ogawa’s novel takes on its most piercing critique. How is it possible to forget so much so quickly, and how does the loss of memory impact the way we act in the present? The disappearances are regrettable, like the loss of harmonicas or the loss of several different types of food, but they generally seem harmless at first. For most of the disappearances, the objects appear self-contained—most of us could survive if we completely forgot what a harmonica was or if we could no longer eat a celery stalk. It’s easy in this sense to understand how the disappearance of minor objects would be accepted over time as no big deal. But with the smaller disappearances come increasingly troubling ones, objects that are a little more complex and abstract: photographs, maps, and books. Eventually, body parts begin to disappear. It becomes evident that these disappearances, while inconsequential when we consider them on a case-by-case basis, add up to devastating results. Once we learn how to forget, even the most seemingly unimportant things, the very act of forgetting becomes easier. At one moment, the narrator asks her editor, simply called ‘R’, whether he believes the hearts of those who forget are “decaying.” He replies,

“I don’t know whether that’s the right word, but I do know that you’re changing, and not in a way that can be easily reversed or undone. It seems to be leading to an end that frightens me a great deal.”

The uncritical acceptance of smaller disappearances produces a clear line to larger, more devastating disappearances. In the stories the narrator recounts from her mother or the accounts given by elders on the island, the disappearances have happened for some time, giving the islanders plenty of time to acclimate to them and naturalize the process. Even these early disappearances are recalled so matter-of-factly that it seems little was done to investigate the unknown process behind these disappearances. Or perhaps at some point, something was being done, but all memory of that has disappeared, too. Perhaps at some point, the very concept of resistance vanished from memory. With no other recourse, most islanders simply continue to accept each disappearance—even as they increase in number and significance.

To forget is to be disconnected from the past, to make it easier to miss the connections that link events or people together in the present. The complete loss of an object, like a map, goes beyond the loss of the map as a physical thing. What disappears with it is the knowledge of where you are in relation to others on the island, the ability to travel, the understanding that other islands exist beyond the narrator’s limited purview. Once a critical mass of information is lost, the linkages between them disappear, making it easier to believe that the world we live in now is how things have always been and that there is no need—and no possible way—to chart another path.

The novel provides some hope that the disappearances are not permanent and that the decaying of hearts can eventually stop. Although the islanders call them “disappearances,” the objects do not physically disappear. Instead, the islanders get rid of these objects themselves after their attachments to them are gone, either by destroying them or throwing them into the river. The disappearances are not a physical phenomenon but a mental and affective one. The Memory Police only exist because some on the island are not affected by the disappearances. Although the Memory Police have rounded up many of the people who do not forget, many, like R, remain safely hidden. 

There are also some glimmers of hope for those who do forget. The narrator falls victim to the disappearances but tries to resist, mostly for the sake of R. For the most part, she finds it difficult to mentally grasp on to objects that have disappeared. But there are moments where hints of memory break through to her consciousness. She sees someone wearing something atop their head and, in a sudden jolt of memory, is able to remember what a hat is even though hats disappeared from the island several years ago. In another scene, she sees something fluttering through the air above her and remembers what a bird is. There are no strong emotions or clear memories attached to these recollections, but she can still pull these disappeared things out of the depths of her mind. They are not entirely forgotten, though perhaps buried deep within her psyche.

Once things are forgotten, it is difficult to get them back. Things ossify, crystallize until the world becomes something naturalized and accepted— things have always been this way . Then the cycle of forgetting begins to perpetuate itself. In a conversation with R, the narrator illuminates this vicious cycle, 

“It’s disturbing to see things that have disappeared, like tossing something hard and thorny into a peaceful pond. It sets up ripples, stirs up a whirlpool below, throws up mud from the bottom. So we have no choice, really, but to burn them or bury them or send them floating down the river, anything to push them as far away as possible.” 

Forgetting is twofold. On the one hand, the natural passage of time obscures the past from us the farther we are from it. But forgetting can also be a conscious decision. While we describe certain historical events or people as “forgotten,” it’s rare that such wholesale forgetting happens. The incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII has only relatively recently become a critical historical event taught in schools; for many white Americans, this was considered “forgotten” history. Yet, the Japanese American community never forgot. The Tulsa Massacre of 1921, where mobs of white citizens brutally attacked the Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District, is another significant historical incident that has been largely “forgotten” until recently. But the Black citizens who survived the attack, their descendants, and other Black Americans never forgot what happened. In both of these cases, the natural human process of forgetting was compounded by the intense desire of white Americans to forget these things ever happened, to never speak of them again. They were made to disappear until most American citizens truly did forget.

The disappearances on Ogawa’s fictional island may have started as a natural phenomenon, but at some point, it seems that the crystallization joined with human acceptance, gaining momentum as more and more people came to accept it. Ogawa pulls no punches with how the novel pans out; while there is some hope, the consequences of generations of forgetting are entirely, painfully realized. Even characters, like the narrator, who try their best to push back against the forgetting, fall prey. The warning of The Memory Police is thus not to beware of fascistic organizations that try to control the populace, but instead to beware of the invisible processes that are constantly occurring that allow such organizations to appear. By the time these entities appear, it is too late. 

Julia Shiota is a writer and editor living in Minnesota. Her short fiction has appeared in Catapult and her other writing can be found in Poets & Writers, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.

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Book Reviews

Quiet, surreal drama — and disappearing objects — in 'the memory police'.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Memory Police

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On a small island, objects disappear — perfume, boats, roses, photographs — and the memory police monitor the inhabitants, ensuring these things will be eternally forgotten. It seems like a metaphor for state surveillance; if The Memory Police were an American novel, it might yield a contrarian hero determined to fight off the tyranny of the police. It would be something akin to The Handmaid's Tale, or the movie version of Minority Report . One can even envision a high-paid Hollywood actor starring in the Netflix adaptation: They're coming for your memories, but she's got a plan to stop them!

But this is a Japanese novel — so for anyone looking for thrills, I'd like to warn you that despite the tagline "Orwellian" on the back cover of the book, this reads much more like a surrealist drama. A very quiet drama, at that.

The protagonist of this tale, translated by Stephen Snyder, is a young writer who endures — and endures seems to be too hard a term, she hardly seems to mind — an increasingly stifling world where goods are scarce, the police arrest citizens in the middle of the night and memories are torn from people's minds. She watches everything with a certain detachment which is not cynical indifference, but merely a deep-rooted passivity.

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At one point the narrator decides to build a secret room in her house to hide her editor, who is in danger of being caught by the police — but even this action, which in another novel might be deemed heroic, here is also laced with that delicate passivity. The overall feeling is like staring at falling snow over long stretches of time, which, frankly, will make those people with more literary proclivities quite happy, and those who want commercial science fiction quite frustrated.

If anything, the book clearly shows the contrast between two different types of writing. We are used to the American style of science fiction, while Ogawa is playing with another deck. Her intent is to analyze not only memory but the creative process — we read parts of a novel in progress which the protagonist is tackling — using very precise language. At times the result is something hauntingly sad, and at others it felt like my feet were being glued to the ground.

In terms of the dreaded C word which is muttered around blogs and hammered into aspiring writers — yes, Character Development: This novel also buckles that notion. The protagonist doesn't develop as much as she marinates. In a way, this paralysis of the soul somewhat reminded me of Tanith Lee, who produced more than one frustratingly apathetic heroine.

There's also a timelessness to the novel which didn't strike me until the end. Originally published in 1994, the difference between the then and now is non-existent because everything seems to occur in a dreamland where the lack of computers, cellphones or cable TV is irrelevant. Thus, it's never dated, which is quite a thing for a work of quasi-science fiction.

If you view The Memory Police as one big, fat metaphor for state control — and I'm sure many people will see it as that — you'll probably find more pleasure in it than if you attempt to consider it in other terms. It's an odd book, not entirely satisfying, but at the same time I have an interest in all things odd. Maybe you do too, in which case it might be, ah, pun intended, memorable.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an award-winning author and editor. Her most recent novel is The Beautiful Ones . She tweets at @silviamg .

Somewhere Out There in a Place No One Knows: Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and the Literature of Forgetting

Article Summary by John Henning

This essay reads Yoko Ogawa’s 1994 novel, The Memory Police , as a subtle allegory for the progression dementia and other neurological disorders. In Ogawa’s book, inhabitants of an unnamed island suffer a series of ‘disappearances’. At the same time on random days, they forget about things like birds, hats, roses, sucking sweets, and music boxes—eventually losing control over various parts of their bodies. In this world, a collective called the Memory Police remove all traces of ‘disappeared objects’ and ruthlessly dispose of islanders whose forgetting doesn’t follow the correct sequence. Since the release of its first English translation in 2019, the text has attracted a handful of interpretations from literary scholars. Most of these focus on the novel’s allegorical potential in relation to issues of totalitarianism and collectively enforced memory loss—as evocative, for example, of the Orwellian dystopia, or the state silencing of radiation victims in Japan. While my essay does not aim to ‘disagree’ with these readings, it does suggest that they should not be considered exhaustive. To do this, I consider The Memory Police alongside a collection of texts from what might be called a ‘literature of forgetting’—Thomas DeBaggio’s Losing my Mind:An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s , David Shenk’s The Forgetting , Nicci Gerrard’s What Dementia Teaches Us about Love , and others—in an attempt to draw out some of their eerie resonances with Ogawa’s island.

Read the full article on the Medical Humanities journal website .

John Henning is reading towards a Master of Arts in English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research is focused on micro-spatial constructions (or ‘small places’) in the literature of South Africa’s interregnum. His essays on the works of Sol Plaatje, Arthur Miller, and Sisonke Msimang have appeared in various South African and international publications.

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The Memory Police

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In The Memory Police , objects on an unnamed island gradually and inexplicably start disappearing. An unknown force causes many of the island’s inhabitants to immediately lose their memories of “disappeared” things and to dispose of them in turn. There are some people who retain their memory, though, and a government-run militia called the Memory Police hunts them down, arrests them, and sometimes even kills them. The narrator , a young woman on the island, is affected by the disappearances (meaning she loses her memories right away). Every time there is a new disappearance—whether it is roses, calendars, or even a body part—the narrator and other people on the island seem to adjust to their new way of life “without much fuss.” The inhabitants’ ability to adapt may at first seem commendable, but by the end of the book, it’s clear that their hearts and minds have been hollowed out as a result of forgetting so much. The more things disappear, the colder and less helpful the townspeople become to one another, and the less they care to fight back or change what is going on. In this sense, the novel portrays memory as a fundamental part of the human experience—without it, people find it more difficult to connect with one another and lead purposeful lives.

Amid all of this, the narrator (who is a novelist) shelters her editor, R , from the Memory Police because he does not forget things when he is supposed to. R constantly tries to assure the narrator that the memories everyday objects trigger are much bigger than the items themselves—these objects can connect people to their family, friends, past generations, even the future. But the disappearances never stop, and eventually the narrator’s entire body and voice disappear—which, in turn, causes her to lose her sense of self. By the end of the novel, the narrator is completely gone. Her disappearance suggests the danger of forgetting things (even seemingly mundane objects) completely and the importance of holding on to memories if we are to retain our connections to other people—and indeed, if we are to be fully alive.

Memory and Connection ThemeTracker

Memory and Connection Quotes in The Memory Police

Ribbon, bell, emerald, stamp . The words that came from my mother’s mouth thrilled me, like the names of little girls from distant countries or new species of plants. As I listened to her talk, it made me happy to imagine a time when all these things had a place on the island.

Yet that was also rather difficult to do. The objects in my palm seemed to cower there, absolutely still, like little animals in hibernation, sending me no signal at all. They often left me with an uncertain feeling, as though I were trying to make images of the could in the sky out of modeling clay. When I stood before the secret drawers, I felt I had to concentrate on each word my mother said.

The little brown creature flew in a wide circle and then vanished north. I couldn’t recall the name of the species, and I found myself wishing I’d paid more attention when I’d been with my father at the observatory. I tried to hold on to the way it looked in flight or the sound of its chirping or the colors of its feathers, but I knew it was useless. This bird, which should have been intertwined with memories of my father, was already unable to elicit any feeling in me at all. It was nothing more than a simple creature, moving through space as a function of the vertical motion of its wings.

“But why do they take people away? They haven’t don’t anything wrong.”

“The island is run by men who are determined to see things disappear. From their point of view, anything that fails to vanish when they say it should is inconceivable. So they force it to disappear with their own hands.”

“Do you think my mother was killed?” I knew it was pointless to ask R, but the question slipped out.

“She was definitely under observation, being studied.” R chose his words carefully.

“It’s true, I know, that there are more gaps in the island than there used to be. When I was a child, the whole place seemed…how can I put this?...a lot fuller, a lot more real. But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow. I supposed that kept things in balance. And even when that balance begins to collapse, something remains. Which is why you shouldn’t worry.”

“Sometimes I try to remember—those were precious moments with my mother—but I can’t recall the objects. My mother’s expression, the sound of her voice, the smell of the basement air—I can remember all that perfectly. But the things in the drawers are vague, as though those memories, and those alone, have dissolved.”

“Memories don’t just pile up—they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord. Though the process, for me, is quite different from what happens to the rest of you when something disappears from the island.”

“Different how?” I asked […]

“My memories don’t feel like they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls.”

In this way we managed to live in relative security. Everything went according to plan, and we seemed to have solutions for any problems that did occur. The old man did much to help us, and R did his best to adjust quickly to the secret room.

But quite apart from the small satisfactions we enjoyed, the world outside was deteriorating day by day. The disappearances, which had slowed down after the roses, returned with two in quick succession: first, photographs, and then fruits of all sorts.

“You’ll forget you ever had a voice,” he continued. “You may find it annoying at first, until you get used to it. You’ll move your lips as you just did, go looking for a typewriter, a notepad. But soon enough you’ll see how pointless it is. You have no need to talk, no need to utter a single word. There’s nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. Then, at last, you’ll be all mine.”

“I think all this crying must be proof that my heart is so weak that I don’t know how to help myself.”

“But I’d say it’s just the opposite. Your heart is doing everything it can to preserve its existence. No matter how many memories these men take away, they’ll never reduce it to nothing.”

“I hope that’s true.”

I looked at R. I needed only to lean slightly in his direction for us to be touching. He raised his hand and brushed away a tear at the corner of my eye with his fingers.

Needless to say, R was violently opposed to losing our collection of novels.

“You’ve got to bring them all here,” he said, “including your manuscript.”

If I do, the room will be buried in books, with no place for you to live.” I shook my head.

“Don’t worry about that, I don’t need much space. If we hide them here, they’ll never find them.”

“But what happens to them? What’s the point of storing away books that have disappeared?”

He sighed and pressed his fingers to his temples—as he always did when we talked about the disappearances. Try as we might to understand each other, nothing changed for either of us. The more we talked, the sadder we became.

When we’d finished eating, the old man went to find the music box hidden in the bathroom. He set it on the table and we listened together. As always, it faithfully repeated its tune, over and over. We stopped chatting, sat up straight, and closed our eyes. I had no idea where or how one was supposed to listen to a music box, but I had decided arbitrarily that closing my eyes would enhance the effect R had hoped it would induce in us.

“Even if the whole island disappears, this room will still be here,” R said. His tone was even and calm, filled with love, as though he were reading an inscription engraved on a stone monument. “Don’t we have all the memories preserved here in this room? The emerald, the map, the photograph, the harmonica, the novel—everything. This is the very bottom of the mind’s swamp, the place where memories come to rest.”

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The Memory Police – Insight Text Guide

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The Memory Police Symbols, Allegory and Motifs

By yoko ogawa.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

Memory Police

They are a symbol to represent living under a dictatorship. They control all people’s memories and those that still remember, like the protagonist’s mother, are taken away and never to be seen again.

The typist is a victim of oppression. She has no freedom of speech and her voice is silenced. This is reflective of how many feel when living under a totalitarian regime.

Protagonist’s disappearance

The eventual disappearance of the protagonist symbolizes the fact that the Memory Police one – they managed to completely take away her freedom and trap her forever by making it seem as though she never existed.

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The Memory Police Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Memory Police is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for The Memory Police

The Memory Police study guide contains a biography of Yoko Ogawa, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Memory Police
• The Memory Police Summary
• Character List

PEKIN, Elektrostal - Lenina Ave. 40/8 - Restaurant Reviews, Photos & Phone Number - Tripadvisor

Interview with Rachel Nadon, CIRM's BMO 2024 postdoctoral fellow

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It was a busy spring for Rachel Nadon! On April 2nd, she began her stay as the  BMO Posdoctoral Fellow at CIRM for the year 2024 , and on July 1st, she will take up her new position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Québec Literature in the Département de littérature, théâtre et cinéma at Université Laval!  Despite her short stay with us, we are eager to find out more about her fascinating research project, which she hopes to pursue as a professor.

But first and foremost, a brief biography is in order. With a PhD in French-language literatures from Université de Montréal, Rachel Nadon works on the relationship between emotions and the sensational press. Member of the Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le livre au Québec (GRÉLQ) , she works at the crossroads of cultural studies and literary history. She co-edited the collective Relire les revues québécoises : histoire, formes et pratiques (PUM, 2021). She is also director of Mens : revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle .

Her research project as a BMO Postdoctoral Fellow, which she plans to pursue,  is “Emotions and archives of feelings: reading Montreal through Allô Police, 1970-2004”.

The question on everyone's mind: why Allô Police?

I've already been working on yellow newspapers for a few years ("yellow newspapers", just to get everyone on the same wavelength, is an expression that includes all sorts of different newspapers, crime papers, gossip papers, saucy cartoon papers, etc.). These are newspapers that are often ephemeral, that don't last long and whose circulation is difficult to evaluate. Allô Police had a very long life, from 1953 to 2004. It also had a huge circulation, between 100,000 and 200,000 copies a week in the 1950s. So, on the one hand, there's the duration and popularity of this newspaper.

And on the other, I have noticed that everyone has one or more anecdotes about Allô Police. When I was a kid, my parents used to cover my eyes a little when we passed the Allô Police in the convenience store! But just about everyone has something to say about Allô Police: reading it only on vacations (like a little party), cutting it up for scrapbooking, reading it on the sly, despite parental prohibitions, etc. It is this conjecture of two elements that intrigues me: its popularity, the widespread yet almost intimate nature of its reading. Although few people mention Allô Police as a legitimate reading habit...

What motivates you to study the relationship between emotions and the sensational press?

When I started reading Allô Police, I realized that emotion was quite important in my reading. I was confronted with articles about mutilated and decapitated people; there were lots of photos of corpses. Itis something that really grabbed me, and which seems to me to go beyond the notion of sensationalism. Starting from my emotions of fascination and disgust, and perplexity too, I came to pay attention to the texts, to the way emotions like fear, disgust, even love, were named. I realized that all this, the mobilization of emotion in different ways, was part of the reading pact of these newspapers. I should point out that my reading emotions are probably not the same as those of another readership, that of the 1950s for example; I cannot assume that, at least!

What are your goals and expectations for your residency as a postdoctoral fellow at CRIEM?

The project is structured in two parts. First, I will be reading copies of Allô Police from the 1976 Olympics to the end of the newspaper's activities in 2004. I'm particularly interested in the 1980s and 1990s, because I want to see how the paper stages the city. For example, what neighborhoods are named, what events are covered? Does it resemble the years I've already studied (the 1950s-1960s)? I will be able to pursue these questions, analyzing the ways in which the city of Montréal is constructed over the course of the articles. I am also going to see how a newspaper like Allô Police situates itself in relation to the pro-sex and anti-sex feminist movements, and everything to do with pornography and sex work. As it's a newspaper that makes a living out of sexuality and its particular circles, I'm interested.

There's a second aspect to the project, that of archives. I want to explore people's memories of this diary, with the idea of reconstructing an archive of readings, or rather an "archive of feelings", to use Ann Czetkovich 's words. The aim is to seek out stories, objects of all kinds, business cards, photocopied editions, photos, scrapbook pages made from Allô Police clippings, etc. This will be a good way to reflect on the different uses of the newspaper and the ways in which people interacted with Allô Police, but also on the memories they retain of it and what it tells us about a way of living in or representing Montréal. It goes beyond a simple "broadcast-reception" type of reading, I want to touch on the uses of the newspaper and its ways of circulating, and of "orienting" us in the city.

Can you explain the concept of the archive of feelings?

Ann Czetkovich is interested in the experience of trauma among lesbian and queer people. According to her, this experience isn't "officially" documented, but is associated with objects or narratives. These objects - it could be a diary or pulp collections - are not necessarily linked to the experience of trauma, but evoke it in different ways for someone or for a community. These objects, figures or photos (for example), are invested with sentimental value and meaning, but they are not considered archives in the institutional sense of the term. Ann Czetkovich, in her book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures , analyzes these archives and "produces" them, too. There is a double movement of analysis and creation (she "constitutes" cultural productions as archives, so to speak), and that is what I want to do too. Does the experience of emotionally reading a newspaper like Allô Police produce an archive of feelings? I would like to collect objects and stories that would enable us to reflect on the relationship between emotions, memory and the city.

This implies creative work.

For the project, I'd like to set up a website, collect alternative archives of Allô Police, meet people who still remember it, and explore different modes of distribution, such as fanzines. I have co-written a "detective serial" in the cultural magazine Liberté, in which I've used the device of fiction to integrate interviews I have already done with Allô Police actors. I'm also thinking of organizing a round-table discussion on the 20th anniversary of Allô Police's demise.

For me, in this project, there is a dimension of research and creation in the strict sense, i.e. reading and research on the one hand, and "reconstituting" the archives on the other. More broadly, it allows me to reflect on the question of archives, which is a complicated one when it comes to large-scale cultural productions. The documents that bear witness to the production of these periodicals are often not intended for conservation or archiving. In fact, the product itself - the newspaper - was never intended for preservation!

Why is it important to study a crime news journal like Allô Police?

On the one hand, it is a place of memory, in the sense of a space of memory that bears witness to many events affecting Montreal and many other places. This place of memory allows us to read the watermark of changes affecting society, but also relationships between people, the way we conceive of crime and criminals. In short, it allows us to reflect on what affects people, and what constitutes an era. And at the same time, it is a place of memory in the most fundamental sense: people remember it. Many readers meet there. It's important to highlight how a newspaper that has had bad press has brought together a community of readers, a community that could be reconstituted by, among other things, the very diverse uses to which this newspaper has been put.

What are your plans for your first months (or rather first years!) as an assistant professor of Québec literature?

One thing is for sure: I want to pursue this project! It is very close to my heart. I am interested in pursuing all these reflections on how a tabloid newspaper like Allô Police has left an emotional, concrete and material mark on people's lives and on the city of Montréal. More broadly, I have a project on the cultural history of bad taste in Québec; to be continued, as they say!

A perfect day in Montréal? It's summer, I get on my bike, I go swimming in Parc Jarry, I have a coffee in the Mile End and we eat hot dogs at Orange Julep..   3 essential symbols of Montréal? Olympic Stadium, Caffè Italia and Milano (together), and the Lachine Canal   Favorite neighborhood? My neighborhood, Little Italy, because of my neighbors!   Bibliography on emotions and cultural & literary studies: Sara Ahmed (2014), Cultural Politics of Emotion , Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press,2 nd ed., 256 p. Ann Czetkovich (2003), An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures , Duke University Press, 368 p. Michel de Certeau (1990), L’invention du quotidien, tome 1 : Arts de faire , Folio, 416 p. Richard Hoggart (1970), La Culture du pauvre , trad. de l’anglais par Jean Claude Passeron, Paris, Minuit, 420 p. Will Straw (2021), «The Pastness of Allo Police» , dans Martha Langford et Johanne Sloan (ed.), Photogenic Montreal: Activisms and Archives in a Post-Industrial City, Montréal, McGill/Queen’s University Press, p. 199-216.

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