The Memory Police

Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian, magical realist novel delves into the darkness underneath our pursuit of—if not the normal—the routine. We witness a protagonist’s world shrink day by day through legally enforced forgetting. As the situation on the isolated island in which the protagonist lives deteriorates, perhaps the most terrifying part is that she finds herself complicit in her own isolation and near-total lack of agency.

I don't normally like melancholic books, but this book touched me as beautiful in its melancholy and thought-provoking. The absurd premise of the novel is that upon an island, objects—such as hats, perfume, and birds—regularly disappear from the island and the inhabitants' memory of these objects. Well, not all of the inhabitants. Very few people continue to remember things that have disappeared. These people are sought out by the memory police.

The saddest aspect of the novel is that people accept their situation as their world becomes smaller and smaller.

The novel really captures the nature of memory and what it means to love and care about others.

Frightening stuff happens in the book—things are disappearing—but it’s told with a warm and light tone, almost as if you’re sailing down a river. Ogawa captures quiet moments like friends eating a slice of cake with such luminosity.

Even when the world is falling apart, there is time for conversations with friends and meals together. 

This short novel still clings to me, even though I read it many years ago. It feels uncanny—incredibly familiar and yet very wrong. It’s a surreal fable about memory and the trauma of losing the things that make us, us.

Set on an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the Memory Police. When a young woman who is… show more.

What struck me while reading The Memory Police was the vitality of memory in keeping civilization—keeping humanity—intact. The apocalypse is often depicted as fire and brimstone—wanton destruction on a global scale. But The Memory Police offers a vision of a more personal apocalypse one where the world around you is stripped of its meaning. What I find equally fascinating and horrifying is that without meaning—without memory—the world is just as obliterated as if it were hit by an asteroid.

Yoko Ogawa offers us a way of looking at the end of one’s world, not as fire and brimstone, but as… show more.