The Memory Police

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa was translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder in 2019; the Japanese edition was published in 1994. It falls under the umbrella genre of science fiction but more specifically belongs in a dystopian, or Orwellian, sub-genre of speculative fiction. While the unnatural elements—the future ability to erase memories—are vaguely connected to science (specifically genetics), the novel’s style is similar to magical realism in that the story explores the quiet, quotidian results of scientific experimentation. Ogawa’s style of reverie evokes Ishiguro, and the text’s surreal qualities echo Murakami. The Memory Police was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Plot Summary

At the start of The Memory Police, the unnamed protagonist recalls a childhood memory of her mother telling her about the disappearances of objects on their island. Her mother remembers everything, unlike most people on the island, who forget the objects shortly after they disappear. The protagonist’s father was an ornithologist; when birds disappeared, he lost his job, and the Memory Police searched their house for bird-related material.

In the present narrative, the protagonist is a novelist who is working with an editor called R. Her parents are dead, and she is friends with her childhood nurse’s widower, a former ferry worker who is known as the “old man.” An old family friend, Professor Inui, visits the protagonist with his wife, daughter, and son, and at their request, she takes some of her mother’s sculptures while they flee to a safehouse.

After learning that R remembers everything like her mother, the protagonist and the old man build him a secret room—her father’s storage room, which the police overlooked in their search. With him moved in, they fall into a rhythm, and she continues to work on a manuscript, portions of which are included in the novel. She is writing about a typist and her typing teacher’s love affair.

The police take the old man and question him about ferries. After he is returned, calendars disappear, and it continuously snows for the rest of the novel. R and the narrator begin an extramarital affair (R’s wife and newborn are unable to see him in hiding). Her manuscript, the story-within-a-story, continues: The typist, who has lost her voice, is being kept captive in a clocktower with a broken typewriter by her sadistic teacher.

Novels disappear, books are burned, and the protagonist gets a job as a typist but agrees to R’s request that she continue working on her manuscript in secret. An earthquake and tsunami result in the old man being injured, but in the rubble, they discover that her mother’s sculptures—those left by the Inuis— held forgotten objects. The old man moves in with the protagonist, and they visit her mother’s country cabin to discover more hidden objects in her art. After a close call with the Memory Police at the train station, they bring the objects to R’s secret room. The old man dies from his untreated injuries, and the narrator manages to write some lines of poetry during sleepless nights.

Body parts begin to disappear, starting with left legs and spreading to right arms. The protagonist manages to finish her manuscript: The voiceless typist is absorbed by the hidden clockworks room in the tower, and her former teacher takes another woman captive to take her place.

R tries to help the protagonist remember her disappeared body, but her voice disappears after she tells his to rejoin the world, certain that the Memory Police have also lost their bodies. He leaves her, as she continues to disappear into the secret room.