Review of The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

Not sure how I feel about this one. I picked it up on a whim as a birthday gift for a friend. The back cover copy describing its dystopian, fascist world seemed intriguing. Afterwards, I remembered I read another novel by Yōko Ogawa long, long ago. Like that one, The Memory Police is explicitly about what happens when we lose our memories—albeit in a very different way. It’s fantastical and dreamlike, yet also quite deadly. And I can’t make up my mind whether I think it’s great or just ho-hum.

Honestly, I don’t think spoilers will ruin this book for you unless you are hardline opposed to them—and I really want to discuss this book as a whole work, ending included. You have been warned.

On an unnamed island, an unnamed protagonist writes a novel. Sporadically, the island’s inhabitants are forced to forget and give up things—physical things, or even concepts. This forgetting is piecemeal, and some people manage to retain their memories. The narrator’s editor, R, is such a person, and she undertakes, with the help of an old man, to hide him away in her house so he isn’t abducted by the eponymous Memory Police.

This novel is interesting for having been written in 1994 yet translated (by Stephen Snyder) and published in English only in 2019. A lot happened during that twenty-five-year gap—yet this book feels like it could have been written yesterday. The Memory Police, with its goons going door-to-door to expunge any lingering objects or even people who might remember a forbidden concept, resonates with the spectre of fascism looming over the demogogic West.

I was disappointed that the ending felt more ephemeral (literally) than I wanted. I was hoping that Ogawa would reveal a sinister mechanism behind the forgetting and provide the narrator with something concrete to resist. Instead, she chooses to keep the antagonist amorphous and abstract. It’s certainly a choice, and of course, I have to respect it even when I dislike it!

Nevertheless, as far as allegory goes, this narrative is an important one in terms of thinking about the social control imposed by fascism. I’m reminded of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, in which Umberto Eco explores the conditions necessary for fascism to take route in early twentieth-century Italy. Ogawa’s narrator is technically a criminal, a member of a resistance even if she doesn’t have any associates other than R and the old man. Yet she never evolves beyond that, never thinks to fight back to dismantle the system itself. This kind of surrender reminds me of people who vocally disapprove of certain political leaders right now, or who say they don’t approve of technologies like generative AI, yet who nonetheless shrug their shoulders in apathy when one suggests they do something about these things.

Maybe this is uncharitable of me—as I just said, the narrator does hide R. Yet even that in and of itself is a weird act. It’s a gender-swapped reversal of the horror story depicted within her own novel, where a man imprisons a woman in an attic, stealing her voice with a typewriter. R’s life has been preserved yet his existence diminished. Then again, he doesn’t really seem all that interested in doing anything else about this either.

This general miasma of apathy amongst Ogawa’s protagonists is frustrating. It’s also not that unrealistic, of course, so who am I to criticize? Nevertheless, I think it’s part of what makes The Memory Police so quixotic to me: Ogawa’s writing is beautiful and her storytelling deep and clever. At the same time, this book is not exactly what I would call fulfilling or satisfying to me.