The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Shortlisted for The 2020 International Booker Prize
“A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It's much like your memory, in that sense.”
Author
Yoko Ogawa
Publisher
Vintage Books
Genre
Dystopian Science Fiction Set in Japan
Number of Pages
274
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Summary
So there is an island. It is governed by someone called The Memory Police. The island has a peculiarity, it has a memory problem. Things on the island – hats, birds, roses, perfumes, gems, and so on – disappear. And the inhabitants of the island lose all memory of it.
Now the memory police ensure that whenever an item disappears the inhabitants get rid of every piece they possess. If they don’t they are in trouble. Now some people's memories are not affected. They remember everything. Such people are caught by the police and no one knows what happens to them.
Now the protagonist, a young woman, lost her mother to the Memory Police because she remembered. And soon she also discovers that her editor (she is a writer) is going to be in trouble. So she decides to hide him. That’s it, that’s the story.
My Review
Although after first reading the blurb I thought this was a very unique plot, and I was anticipating a dramatic end. But the whole thing was just too gentle and bland and directionless for my liking. At the end of it, I felt like the whole thing was very vague.
The strength of the writing was I think, the theme of loss and control that was asserted over and over in subtle ways.
But there were questions that bothered me– why? Why do things disappear on the island- there had to be some explanation? What did the government benefit from such an arrangement? Now the Gilead Republic in Handmaid’s Tale – another dystopian world – did what they did to have babies because their wives were infertile. What was the purpose here?
Also, there was no explanation as to why certain people remembered. I wouldn’t have minded even if there was a philosophical logic to the whole thing. But nothing at all was mentioned.
Final Verdict
Nevertheless, I did manage to keep reading the whole book, so it’s hypnotic in a way. And it did do pretty well on the haunting and magical realism themes, which is what I was looking for, so I will not rate it anything less than 3 stars.
Who Should Read This
The blurb mentioned that people who liked George Orwell’s 1984 might like this, as it has a similar theme. I haven’t read it.
Yōko Ogawa (小川 洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored „An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics“ with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.
- Top Quotes from The Memory Police -
- “Memories are a lot tougher than you might think. Just like the hearts that hold them.”
- “Men who start by burning books end by burning other men,”
- “My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”
- “But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance.”
- “A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It's much like your memory, in that sense.”
- “If you read a novel to the end, then it’s over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I’d much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever.”
- “In general,” he continued, “most things you worry about end up being no more than that—just worries.”
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