Varieties of The Fantastic in Fiction

Going into this novel, I expected a political dystopia similar to that of George Orwell’s 1984. Despite sharing the theme of a surveillance state, however, the two stories have very little in common. Unlike 1984, The Memory Police, while undoubtedly being a tale about the pitfalls of totalitarianism, focused much more on the individual, existential aspect of such a situation than the how and why. What makes us who we are? What happens to a person’s spirit when their culture has been eradicated, when they have nothing left to root their identity in? This story concludes with the thought that they will simply fade away. This is the intention of people who destroy cultures: to destroy the people connected to them.

Of course, this isn’t just a story about things being taken from people. They are literally gone from people’s memories. Someone can pick up a piece of ribbon and feel it, see it for what it is, but it is meaningless to them — they have no memory of it, no emotional connection to it. It is as though they have never encountered a ribbon before, and don’t see why they should care to. This is not something that can really happen to people, at least not intentionally or on a large scale. I believe that this is a fantastical condensation of something that happens over a span of generations. In real life, when a culture is “disappeared,” it is not the people who lived in it before that lose their deeper connection to it, but their children and grandchildren, who must be raised in a world where the things that their parents and grandparents held dear no longer exist. They may hear bits and pieces of what once was from their elders, but it will be largely meaningless to them, removed from their personal reality. They will have lost something that they never had. Condensing this generational experience into a single person makes it more poignant, more visible, so that the reader can see just how invasive a loss of culture really is into every aspect of a person’s life.

There are also the people in this story who do not forget. The people who remember, who could hypothetically pass knowledge onto those who do not, must be disappeared, too, in order to prevent that from happening. I believe that the existence of these characters serves multiple purposes. First, I think that they serve to represent people watching their children and grandchildren live divorced from their heritage. Second, they provide contrast to the ones who do not remember. Their relative fullness makes the emptiness of those who have forgotten even more striking. Even then, there may be things that were disappeared before they were born, that nobody has hope of remembering. The last is that they are the only ones who can say certain things that Ogawa felt needed to be said. R, the narrator’s editor who does not forget, tries again and again to encourage her to remember. He pushes her to finish her novel, which never could have happened without his influence, and he espouses the importance and necessity of remembering.

The novel that the narrator writes is clearly of great importance. It runs parallel to the actual novel’s main storyline: the narrator’s life. It explores its main character’s loss of self and of the will to continue. Most importantly, the narrator of the main story manages to finish it despite its disappearance. What does this mean? The implication here is that, although difficult, it is possible to get something back once it has been disappeared. Similarly, the narrator speaks about disappeared things as though she knows they are still inside her somewhere, however unreachable, and with practice she comes closer to reaching them. Still, it is not enough, and she succumbs to the disappearance anyway. In the end, she is left in the secret room with the other disappeared things, and she only asks to be remembered.