"I had only to surrender each new disappearance to find myself carried along quite naturally to the place I needed to be."
I was unfamiliar with the brilliance of Yoko Ogawa, but recommendations of her "The Memory Police" seemed to follow me wherever I went. After I tired of interminable holds for this book at local libraries, I broke down and purchased it.
Consider it money well spent.
Set on an anonymous island, "The Memory Police" details a community living on the knife point of constant fear. It seems that, randomly, objects on the island disappear, followed by an expectation that connections to the disappeared objects must be destroyed.
How is this discard process enforced? The Memory Police, a faceless security unit that targets not only those who attempt to preserve the past, but those rare few whose memories don't obey the mandate to quickly forget the vanished items. This mandate becomes even more difficult to follow as the disappearing objects become progressively meaningful and essential.
" ... I realized now that I was already unable to remember what this thing called a rose had looked like ... Dusk was falling over the sea, and no matter how long I peered into the distance, I could no longer make out the petals."
Ogawa's work is stunning in its terse, almost harsh prose, managing to be eerie yet mesmerizing, dated yet timeless, jarring yet passive. The island where the disappearances are occurring conveys a sense of pervasive isolation, reinforced by the decision to share precious few of the narrator's hopes, dreams, and back story details.
The protagonist is a novelist in a community that has lost the importance of words, writing more to work out her internal comprehension of what is happening to her. Almost unwittingly, her novels broach the loss of loved ones, buried secrets, and mental turmoil.
Originally written in 1994 but with a translation released in 2019, "The Memory Police" possesses a dream-like quality, marked by what The Chicago Tribune calls "atmospheric horror." While the translation must have brought up a host of problems, the book is a device that works as a statement on and metaphor for fascism and its inherent loss of identity.
"People -- and I'm no exception -- seem capable of forgetting almost anything, much as if our island were unable to float in anything but an expanse of totally empty sea."
This novel mirrors the themes of George Orwell, of course, but also mixes in elements of "Children of Men," "Fahrenheit 451," and even "The Diary of a Young Girl." With its timely commentary on the terrors of state surveillance, this work will stay with you long after you're finished reading.
If you needed another reason to buy instead of wait, "The Memory Police" boasts one of the best book covers I can remember.
Just don't get too attached ... in case it disappears.
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