Meike's Reviews > The Memory Police

Now Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020
Who we are strongly depends on our past experiences and the reality that has surrounded us, so what happens if, bit by bit, this reality is made to disappear, and with it the memories ingrained in our hearts? In Yoko Ogawa's highly allegorical novel, the enigmatic "memory police" is controlling the population of a remote island, subjugating the inhabitants by continually forcing them to destroy and forget things like roses, perfume or birds, and all memories attached to them. Every lost memory leaves a new hole in people's hearts, but those who won't forget will be taken away and might get killed. How long can a person endure when those trying to control their mind eat away at their heart?

Our protagonist is an unnamed young novelist, thus a person who professionally creates coherence and identity, who aims to preserve and represent the world in narratives. When the memory police prepares to arrest her editor because he is unable to erase his memories, she hides him in her home, aided by an old man she befriended. Secretly, she tries to proceed working on her latest novel about a woman who has lost her voice - this whole novel-within-the-novel is twisting and reflecting the narrated world, asking questions about expression (losing your voice and losing your memory), freedom (being phsyically and psychologically captured), and death (losing your identity and losing your phsyical self). In all constellations Ogawa presents, I was fascinated by the protagonists' coping mechanisms, which you could often just as well call self-betrayal - this text is also a meditation on the workings of the mind under the conditions of authoritarian terror or human cruelty.

In this novel, a lot remains unexplained, e.g. why some people can and others can't forget as ordered by the memory police, what the ultimate goal of the memory police is (if they even have one beyond total control), or who their bosses are. Sometimes, I also felt like the author wasn't able to stringently employ her narrative concept, because how should the characters refer to things after they have disappeared? On top of that, there is the theme of climate change hovering in the background, but it isn't coherently tied into the main storyline. Still, these factor do not diminish the impact of the text, which more than anything is set up to be an allegory. In this respect, Ogawa's work reminded me of the wonderful Han Kang.

"The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn. They drive me to burn things and I can only stop when everything is in ashes", explains the narrator's editor at one point. This book contains numerous sentences like this one, investigating the relationship between memory, feelings, freedom and identity. A very worthwhile read, cleverly constructed and rendered with a lot of poetic sensibility.