Yoko Ogawa’s beautifully fantastical novel The Memory Police describes a world in which people are forced to forget items little by little, until eventually they forget themselves. During each disappearance, everyone will wake up “[and] feel that something has changed from the night before.” (1) After this, they must get rid of everything remaining of that item, which proceeds like a funeral. However, Ogawa has complicated this system in several ways. People are also “disappeared” because those who can still remember lost items are taken away by the Memory Police. The first instance we know of this happening is with the speaker’s mother. I think this sets up the major conflict of the novel because her mother was a craftsman who literally carved things into stone and wood. Her very presence was a threat to forgetfulness as she could also remember the lost items and would tell the speaker about them. With her disappearance, the conflict of the novel is primed to be about the struggle between remembering the impossible and the speaker’s struggle against the Memory Police. This escalates as the speaker hides her editor, R, in a secret room in her house because he is someone who can still remember.
Another conflict in the story is related to identity. We are never given the speaker’s name or her pronouns (so I’m simply assuming she’s a woman), but we can learn things about her through her writings, which are included inside of the novel. R had said, “the conscious mind is embedded in a subconscious that’s ten times as powerful,” which prepares us to read the speaker’s writing as a sort of manifestation of her fears, wants, and joys. (24) Of course, the speaker tells us about her past and we learn what type of person she is from her actions, but it’s the small details we aren’t given that make the edges of her image blurry. As the novel progresses, she also loses her vibrancy as she loses things that are integral to her life, such as novels and the old man. Emptiness is a major concept that flows throughout the novel’s descriptions, and it’s a presence that the speaker balks at but also something she understands is inevitable. After all, she’s the one who is constantly asking what will become of the island and the rest of the people there.
Overall, the struggle of the novel paints a picture of human suffering as it relates to grief and loss. With each disappearance, the speaker has to, “make do with a hollow heart full of holes,” and is forced to give up a bit of herself with each loss. (82) The losses destroy her sense of self until she is even forced to forget her own body, and she is only left as voice surrounded by things she cannot remember. I think Ogawa has created a world that makes the characters reckon with how they understand themselves when their memories are forcibly removed, as well as how they understand each other. These memories are integral to the human connections in the novel. For example, the speaker forgets what hats are, but her neighbor is continually referred to as the “hat-maker” because that was how she understood him when they met. As her memories disappear, her connections with the people around her are also forced to change. In the end, the speaker can only cling to things she doesn’t understand to try to still feel connected to the people lost to her.
I love this observation that “her mother was a craftsman who literally carved things into stone and wood. Her very presence was a threat to forgetfulness as she could also remember the lost items and would tell the speaker about them.”