This is not a critique or even a review. It’s more a riff, I suppose. A bit of musing about a book I recently read and how it came across to me.
The book is Yōko Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police and everything I’ve seen related to it uses terms like dystopian and Orwellian. It’s easy to see why. It is set in an authoritarian, fascist world with, yes, Memory Police.
Flowers disappear. Birds. Novels. Limbs. People.
When something or someone disappears from the world of Ogawa’s story, it’s the job of the Memory Police to ensure it stays that way. And that everyone forgets. They round up and disappear people who remember.
The main character, the nameless narrator, tells her story while also telling the story of a novel she’s writing, which mirrors her own.
For me the dystopian nature of the world of The Memory Police is just staging. I’m not quite sure what this book is about, but I don’t think it’s that, at least not in the way we think of those books (which is often social and political critique).
And though it is about memory, that seems more a tool for looking at another theme altogether, perhaps connected with it, but not the theme itself. For lack of a better word, it seems to me the theme is victimization. It seems a quiet, uncomfortable meditation on the subject.
It’s about victims and victimizers, the nature of both, and the overall nature of victimization. In the book, I see victimizers using control both crassly and subtly, and victims silently, willingly relinquishing it. And memory (or perhaps forgetting is the better word), used as a tool to salve the process. The victims are so passive. The victimizers so calmly assured in their control (particularly the typing teacher in the narrator’s novel).
Of the victims, it seems their actions are largely retreating ones. Retreat as survival. Retreat into smaller worlds, eventually nothing more than a room where they are one of two kinds of victim.
There are those whose retreating action is a form of resistance, like the character known as R, who remembers. More often, they are like those of the narrator (and the narrator in her novel), ones of acceptance and surrender. Even a desire to be completely taken over and vanished.
It’s a very disturbing book not simply because the setting is so weird but what happens, and what doesn’t happen, seems so…uncomfortable. Unsettling. It’s a bizarre world that feels real in an uncanny way. True.
Ogawa’s stories are almost always disturbingly off kilter tales, usually dark, involving quiet, even passive characters, memory, and small spaces.
I find it strange that I like them so much. But I do. I imagine I’ll be reading The Memory Police again because I liked it so much and that, I suppose, is because Yōko Ogawa is such a wonderful writer.
It’s interesting to note that The Memory Police is the title of the English translation. The original Japanese title is Hisoyaka na kesshō, which roughly translates as Secret Crystallization. (I’ve no idea if that has any significance.)