Hello again! I can feel summer in the air and the semester has ended for the students, so the library is quiet and empty for the next couple of months! That also means it’s time for me to turn my attention to things that got pushed off during the semester. But, before that, I’ve brought y’all another review. Definitely an interesting one!
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
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I’ve found myself turning to translated books that were first published in Japan more and more often, and I’m enjoying this. The wording and worlds created are interesting, different, and ring a different bell while I read them. And this one is no different, though it does bring to mind a book I read a few years ago, called The Book of M by Peng Shepherd. Both of these books deal with memories, and what memories mean to us as humans and us as individuals.
For a lot of the characters in this book, they lose specific memories of items. This items then disappear from the collective memory. When a memory leaves, just about everyone in the community comes together to get rid of the item, or watch it leave, and it never comes back. It’s…just gone. But for a select few, they still remember. They carry the memory of that item, and cannot move on past the forgetting of that thing. The main character is an author, and someone who forgets. Their editor, who is only mentioned as R throughout the whole book, is someone who remembers. This is a danger as there is an antagonistic force in this world called the Memory Police, and they enforce the forgetting of the item or thing that has left the collective memory. And they seek out those that still remember and they are rounded up and taken somewhere no one knows.
It eventually gets to the point where R is scared that he will be rounded up by the Memory Police. Our main character, with help from a family friend, a kindly older man, they hide R in the main character’s house, to keep him safe away from the Memory Police. This feels a bit like the hiding of Jewish families during WWII, quiet, safety, with the tension of possibly being found out and then everyone would be punished by the Memory Police. And it comes close, the Memory Police actually raid the house, looking for items that have been forgotten, as the main character’s mother was also someone who remembered, but she was taken when the main character was small, so little remains, both of memories and their mother.
Eventually, those who forget start to forget parts of their body, starting with their left legs, meaning that while those legs are still attached to their bodies, they no longer remember them, so everyone eventually figures out how to move and go about their day-to-day without use of their left leg. And it gets worse from there, and all R can do is watch as eventually his friends forget themselves, their own existence, and just…vanish. The last thing the main character tells R is that he’ll eventually be able to come out of hiding with everyone else who remembers. And it leaves it there! We don’t know if R found anyone else who remembered, once it was safe for them to come out of hiding. Or if they were alone on this island as the last remembering person.
Memories…the ability to remember the good and the bad and everything else in between, as well as to have objects to interact with. I do think a lot of what makes a human a human is our ability to have memories and to interact with more memories and to create and write down those memories. And to contemplate a world where things are forgotten and the memories associated with those things are just gone is a world that asks a lot of you. Yes, you eventually figure out how to work around the thing that vanished, but what about those that continue to remember? How do you pretend to work around the thing that is gone? Or do you? So many questions, and none of them answered, not really. And it always makes you think a little bit more about the world you as well. What impact do memories have on you? What do you do with your memories?
Tiny Navajo Reads 