The Memory Police

“I realized that everything I knew about them had disappeared from inside me: my memories of them, my feelings about them, the very meaning of the word ‘bird’—everything.”

Another scene from the narrator’s youth contains the first description of a disappearance that occurs in the novel—the disappearance of birds, which holds special significance because her father was an ornithologist. We learn that the disappeared thing can still exist on the island, but the concept—represented by the word—of the thing is taken away. The linguistic representation of the forgotten thing is connected with the islanders’ emotional and logical comprehension of it.

“‘The island is run by men who are determined to see things disappear. From their point of view, anything that fails to vanish when they say it should is inconceivable. So, they force it to disappear with their own hands.’”

Here, R is talking with the narrator about the “hand”-wielded power of the Memory Police: physical “force” as a method to enforce mental erasures. The police-state rulers are “men”; no women are ever seen in Memory Police uniforms, and this reinforces the idea of physicality as a method for subduing the citizens. The theme of island isolation also develops here.

“All these words, not yet properly defined or understood, were buzzing incessantly in my head.”

When the narrator learns of the flight of the Inui family, she is unfamiliar with new terms like “safe houses” and “genetic code.” Resistance to the police state is what spawns the addition of words—a creative act—to a language that is suffering from disappearances. Words are compared to animals (“buzzing”), a metaphor that is later developed by comparing pages fluttering to bird wings.

“Just yesterday, it had been an utterly unremarkable stream where, at most, you might spot the back of a carp from time to time. But now it was far too strange and beautiful to call it simply a river.”

The island’s river that leads to the sea is an important feature of the novel. It is a literary allusion to the Greek river of forgetting, Lethe, as well as a physical site of sacrificing objects that have disappeared. In this passage, the river is covered in rose petals, which have been forgotten, so the familiar site becomes “strange,” developing the theme of manufacturing the uncanny.

“It’s subtle but it seems to be speeding up, and we have to watch out. If it goes on like this and we can’t compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it’s completely hollowed out, we’ll all disappear without a trace.”

The protagonist has a tendency to ask difficult questions and present unsettling ideas; this passage is one oracular example. She accurately predicts the disappearances of the islanders’ bodies and voices. The old man doesn’t believe this prediction, but he dies before bodies and voices disappear. In fact, the last traces are still disappearing at the end of the novel.

“Someday, even the Memory Police are bound to disappear. That’s what happens to everything on this island.”

Again, the narrator has a moment of foresight: This passage foreshadows that after bodies disappear, there are no bodily Memory Police walking the streets. In Chapter 10, she is trying to convince R to hide in the secret room she and the old man prepared for him, and she believes he will one day be able to escape the room after the Memory Police disappear. R does have a chance to get off the island—to rejoin others who can remember rather than be exiled in a site of alienation—at the end of the novel.

“Words seem to retreat further and further away with each disappearance. I suspect the only reason I’ve been able to go on writing is that I’ve had your heart by my side all along.”

This passage develops the theme of the craft of writing; the narrator can persist—overcome writer’s blocks—with the help of her editor, R, who can remember everything. He can supply words that have disappeared from her mind, and this is a hyperbolic, but accurate, description of a writer-editor relationship in the creative process. Also, the heart motif is developed here, with the memory-filled heart supporting the hole-filled heart; R retains more emotional intelligence because he retains memories associated with forgotten words.

“Photographs are precious. They preserve memories. [...] Nothing comes back now when I see a photograph. No memories, no response. They’re nothing more than pieces of paper. A new hole has opened in my heart, and there’s no way to fill it up again.”

Another example of the omnipresent heart motif, this passage, spoken by the protagonist to R, is about the profound link between photographs and memories. Many memories are anchored in photographs, and erasing them ensures the islanders will be more subdued when bodily disappearances start to occur. The disappearance of the photographs severs links between people—links among the living as well as links to the dead.

“‘I never made it to the land of sleep or anywhere else—like the snow vanishing into the sea.’”

The narrator tells R about taking her father’s sleeping pills as a child, and her comparison develops the snow motif. Both the desire for the “land of sleep” and snow symbolically evoke death, but death is not reached; even at the end of the novel, the process of “vanishing” is not yet complete.

“It occurred to me that the disappearances were perhaps not as important as the Memory Police wanted us to believe. Most things would disappear like this when set on fire, and they could be blown away on the wind with very little regard for what they might once have been.”

As the narrator burns her calendars, per the Memory Police decree, she contemplates impermanence. There is an acceptance of the idea that, over time, everything can be forgotten. Juxtaposed with the narrator’s ideas about her novel and hiding R, this acceptance of impermanence speaks to her willingness to sacrifice herself for her art and for those who can remember everything (and therein have fuller hearts).

“No matter how long we waited, spring never came, and we lay buried under the snow along with the ashes of the calendars.”

This passage develops the snow motif that runs throughout the novel; it shows how instead of simply taking away objects and their associated sense-memory and emotional intelligence, the disappearances escalate and become connected to a breakdown of the progression of seasons. An eternal winter alludes to climate change, and the Memory Police abolishing calendars alludes to a cover-up and denial of climate change. Fire—“ashes”—is connected with snow, emphasizing the usual poetic contrasts in seasonal cycles (seen in haiku and haibun poetry especially).

“‘[Y]ou’re changing, and not in a way that can be easily reversed or undone. It seems to be leading to an end that frightens me a great deal.’”

R reveals his fears about the future during the old man’s birthday party; this foreshadows the disappearance of the protagonist’s body and voice at the end of the novel. The old man’s death comes before the “end” that “frightens” R. However, R sees that the narrator’s heart is “changing”—she will accept the disappearances of her bodily autonomy and voice because of the holes in her heart.

“Novels have disappeared. Even if we keep the manuscripts and the books, they’re nothing more than empty boxes. Boxes with nothing inside. You can peer into them, listen carefully, sniff the contents, but they signify nothing.”

In addition to its allusion to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, this passage speaks to structuralist theories of language. “Boxes” that create meaning are the signifier and the signified (together combining to form signs) in the theories of Levi-Strauss, Saussure, and Derrida. Novels as “boxes” represent words and concepts—the building blocks—of language, to emphasize that forgetting fiction is forgetting language.

“The moon and stars were nowhere to be seen, as though they had been scattered by the brilliance of the flames, and only the corpses of burned books lit the sky.”

The act of burning books, enforced by the Memory Police, is seen as unnatural or against nature because the smoke obscures the celestial objects. Japanese poets, such as Basho, as well as poets from across the Near, Far, and Middle East—like Li Po and Rumi—praise the moon repeatedly and emphatically. That a violent act, one that creates literary “corpses,” comes between the moon and the islanders casts it in a very negative light.

“The pages had caught the breeze, and it fluttered as it flew, as if dancing on air [...] just the way birds had once spread their wings and flown off to distant places. But this memory, too, was soon erased by the flames, leaving behind nothing but the burning night.”

Another connection between the natural world and novels occurs at the burning library. The narrator momentarily remembers her father’s former occupation as ornithologist and connects it to her own occupation, but these memories are lost like the stories she once knew. This passage develops the theme of manufacturing the uncanny—books become unfamiliar to the writer.

“If the old man was frightened, it must be a terrible thing. A monster at the bottom of the sea?”

The narrator does not remember the word “tsunami,” but the old man does; this is an example of a word not being in use and therefore being forgotten, rather than a word that has disappeared as a result of a police action. Like the island’s decade without snow, this long-absent (not in the narrator’s lifetime) post-quake event is another allusion to climate change.

“‘When the surface of your soul begins to stir, I imagine you want to capture the sensation in writing. Because that’s how you’ve written all your novels.’”

After novels disappear, the narrator agrees to continue writing in secret, but she has trouble working on her manuscript. R suggests she try to elicit sensory memories with objects her mother hid in the statues that Professor Inui left at her house. This develops the craft of writing theme; “sensation” is inspiration.

“‘I suppose memories live here and there in the body,’ the old man said, moving his hand from his chest to the top of his head. ‘But they’re invisible, aren’t they? And no matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone, if no one pays attention to it. They leave no trace, no evidence that they ever existed. But I suppose you’re right when you say we should do everything we can to bring back memories of the things that have disappeared.’”

This passage echoes an earlier one by the narrator (Chapter 15, Page 133); both discuss the inevitability of loss. Everything “vanishes” in an impermanent world, especially intangible memories. The heart motif also surfaces in the mention of the old man’s “chest.”

“‘So even if we resist the Memory Police, we can’t resist the fate that separates us from R.’”

The old man says this to the narrator when they don’t get sense-memories from the forgotten objects. They can fight for R, or art—in the case of the protagonist’s manuscript—but their memories can be erased; their future fates are tied to memories (or lack thereof) of the past. The self can be made completely uncanny for them, while R retains autonomy over his memories, and thus his body and voice.

“‘What matters is the story hidden deep in the words. You’re at the point now where you’re trying to extract that story. Your soul is trying to bring back the things it lost in the disappearances.’”

R encourages the narrator’s poetic attempts to return to writing after the disappearance of novels. In poetry, language crystallizes, and the protagonist is digging into the crystals for a narrative—R describes the craft of writing fiction as “story” that comes from poetic language. The imagistic verse she produces as a first step is sensory and soulful.

“I had only to surrender to each new disappearance to find myself carried along quite naturally to the place I needed to be.”

After body parts start to disappear, the narrator allows herself to be “carried along.” She adapts to losing her left leg and right arm, typing on her manuscript as long as she can as an act of resistance, but she surrenders to the ideas of impermanence that she and the old man mentioned in earlier chapters (Chapter 15, Page 133; Chapter 24, Page 231). The forgetting starts to feel natural, as opposed to the unnatural burning of books.

“‘I want to stay with you, but that won’t be possible. Your heart and mine are being pulled apart to such different, distant places. Yours is overflowing with warmth and life and sounds and smells, but mine is growing cold and hard at a terrifying pace. At some point it will break into a thousand pieces, shards of ice that will dissolve.’”

The narrator tells R she won’t be able to remain much longer. The heart motif highlights their differences, this time using temperatures—he is warm while she, like the rest of the island and islanders, is cold—as well as sensory memory—he remembers more aural and olfactory details about the past while she is taste-less ice dissolving. R’s solid heart is contrasted with her mutable one.

“‘I wonder whether the story will remain after I disappear.’

‘Of course it will. Each word you wrote will continue to exist as a memory,here

in my heart, which will not disappear. You can be sure of that.’

‘I’m glad. I’d like to leave behind some trace of my existence on the island.’”

Throughout the novel, Ogawa uses minimal dialogue tags, but it is always clear who is speaking; here, the narrator wonders about the fate of her manuscript after she disappears completely. R promises to use his solid heart to remember her story, keeping her art—a “trace” of her—alive. This passage develops the craft of writing theme; the manuscript is a record of the “existence” of the artist through her art.