@twolf

I recently finished reading Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa. I wasn’t impressed at first, but the book has floated in and out of my thoughts for a few weeks, prompting me to think about this tricky thing called “memory,” a component of the self that is both defining and beguiling. Sometimes we choose to forget; mostly, I think, we can’t help but remember. But what good, really, is this thing called memory? In Memory Police, people are compelled—through a mysterious and controlling police force—to collectively erase certain things from their minds: birds, flowers, books, eventually even parts of their own bodies, leaving them disabled yet ambivalent about their increasingly uncomfortable circumstances. How can they miss what they don’t remember? A few rare people in the dystopian society have immunity to the memory erasures; but those people are hunted and exterminated by the police. Interestingly, in what feels like blunt cynicism from Ogawa, neither those who lose their memories nor those who retain them fare better in the end. The majority, under the mysterious mind spell, are hobbled to the point where they can no longer care for themselves; and the resistant minority are doomed to a life of hiding, decaying in solitude until they are inevitably caught. Everyone either disappears or is disappeared. Yesterday I found a box of old, random photos and other items detailing every decade of my life from stifling early childhood to awkward middle school years, to my relatively happy thirties in New York. It was this box that prompted me to recall Ogawa’s book. Some of the forgotten memorabilia was a wondrous discovery: my old commemorative stamp collection!—artful relics of the disappearing snail mail era. Other things were better left undiscovered, including old journals (I must remember to burn my journals) and candids from college: Was I really that unkept? The physical evidence of me ended in the early 2000s. It must be the digital revolution that disrupted my story, at least as it was captured in glossy paper and printed collectables. I wondered, passively shuffling from memory to memory, if without these physical things, my past selves would already be forgotten. In Memory Police, it is always objects and physical things (eventually people) that disappear. It provokes me to ponder what portion of me is my actual self, as I am today, and what portion of me is the memories and things I have collected along the way. One of the more nuanced aspects of Memory Police is the novel that develops inside of the novel. The narrator is writing a manuscript that gradually begins to mirror her own story in key ways. But her publishing endeavor is suddenly disrupted when books—specifically novels—turn out to be the next item erased from collective memory. Thanks to the encouragement of an immune friend who believes she can finish writing if she tries hard enough to remember the craft, the narrator musters her recollective will, exhausting herself but managing to write the novel's eerie ending just before her own. Her manuscript, echoing the abuse of the Memory Police, is about a manipulative, mind-controlling man who has locked a woman away in a room and taken away her ability to communicate. Although afraid, the woman is dependent on her captor and has a warped affection for him, an old story. Just before her captor returns after a long absence, she learns she is being discarded and replaced by another woman, effectively dispersed from his memory. She disappears. The ending of the novel within the novel foreshadows the narrator’s similar demise on a grim note: “The final moment has arrived.” Ogawa seems to be asking her readers to consider, in more than one way, what is the use of clinging to memories. It’s not useful. No one in the book benefits. But that’s probably not the point. I think the point is that we must accept the inevitable. I’m not sure if my box of personal memories will ever be useful; I’m also not sure it matters. Certainly, I don’t want my memories to define or influence who I am today. But discarding or refusing to revisit them feels harsh. I am attached. Whether I like it or not, I am my whole story, until one day I disappear.

2 replies

2 recasts

17 reactions