Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police – The Meaning in a Nutshell

Dr Mark’s The Meaning in a Nutshell

Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police (1994) (translated by Stephen Snyder, 2019)

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (translated by Stephen Snyder, 2019) was originally published in Japanese as the Secret Crystal (1994). It is a dystopian novel inspired by Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, also known as The Diary of Anne Frank (1947, English translation 1952). Anne Frank was a Jewish teenager who was a victim of the Holocaust whose family hid for two years in an attic in Amsterdam in occupied Holland to escape the Nazis only to be caught by the Gestapo not long before the war’s the end. In Yoko Ogawa’s novel, the main characters live on an imaginary island that serves as a microcosm of contemporary society where they are victims of an oppressive police state and its ruthless Memory Police. They have to be vigilant regarding their increasingly intrusive and destructive oppressors, especially since one of them has been forced to go into hiding in the basement of the main character’s home, which, if he is discovered, could imperil all of them. The novel is particularly interested in how most people in an oppressed population simply accommodate successive additions to the oppression and try to get on with their lives as best they can, which they attempt to do throughout the novel until they and their society are destroyed entirely. The novel is written in the style of magical realism, where surreal fantasy elements in an otherwise realistic alternate world are treated as dimensions of reality by the characters in the story.

The novel explores the feelings of the main characters as the police state becomes increasingly oppressive, ‘disappearing’ objects and the memories associated with them with increasing severity until the individuals and the society the Memory Police sought to control are destroyed by the very efforts to control them. The novel presents most individuals as likely to acclimatise themselves to increasing oppression, while those who are the most threatened hide in safe houses. Only a few resist, which usually takes forms of discreet, subtle disobedience. For example, in an oppressive police state that removes ordinary objects from society, the act of preserving one of these objects is subversion. In addition, in an oppressive police state that seeks to eradicate memories, the act of remembering is resistance.

The Memory Police enforce the disappearances and police people’s memories. They seem to keep files on people and know details about them before they raid their homes without notice. They usually act with unfeeling ruthlessness. They confiscate things and even references to things that have been ‘disappeared’. They are suspicious of everyone and anyone, and they can arbitrarily detain individuals for questioning (like the old man) or take people away forever (like the narrator’s mother). The Memory Police are uniformed and armed. They patrol the streets and create a climate of fear. No one is safe and anyone can be arrested.

Importantly, memory, which is targeted in this police state, is presented as integral to identity as well as a source of pleasure. To remove one’s memories is to therefore compromise one’s authentic sense of self and to diminish one’s pleasure in life. Meanwhile, creative people, such as a sculptor and an editor of novels, take the lead in committing small acts of resistance. They are therefore shown to be worthy of respect as advocates of individual freedom. The unnamed main character, who is the narrator of the story and a writer by profession, is encouraged by their example to follow their lead and commit her own small acts of resistance. In addition, the novel conveys that even in the midst of increasing oppression, moments of happiness and touching relationships can be found.

This is a novel about living in fear. The main characters and most of society live in fear of the Memory Police. People adjust to the disappearances and try to do so without complaint since complaint would attract the attention of the Memory Police. People always have to be careful as expressions of sincere feeling or banned memories can get individuals into serious trouble. People learn to not make waves and stay under the radar of the oppressive police state apparatus. However, the oppression practised by the police state is presented as having an intrinsic logic of escalation that eventually leads to the destruction of the people and the society it was supposed to control.

Influenced by postmodernism, the novel contains a novel within a novel. This involves the narrator of the main story writing a novel about a woman, a trainee typist, who is charmed by her seductive typing teacher into a relationship with him. This leads to him magically removing her voice and locking her in a hidden room upstairs above the typing school, thereby depriving her of freedom so she is totally dependent on him for everything in life. This seems to be a feminist attack on the prevalence of patriarchy and misogyny in many heterosexual relationships. The unfortunate circumstances of the oppressed typing student who is in love with her typing teacher has deliberate parallels to the novel’s wider theme denouncing police state oppression and control. For many women, a relationship with a man can feel like being subjected to police state oppression. Women risk becoming trapped in a relationship where they lose their voice, freedom, and sense of identity, just as people controlled by oppressive regimes lose their voice, freedom, and sense of identity. By contrast, the narrator’s romantic relationship with her editor known as R is depicted as mutually supportive and loving, and as representing how the author believes relationships between and man and woman should be.

The inclusion of this novel within a novel also implies that, for creative people, art imitates life. The dramatic predicaments involving the typing student can be seen, to some degree, to reflect what is going on in the writer’s life.

Student resources by Dr Mark Lopez

The purpose of the concise notes of Dr Mark’s The Meaning in a Nutshell is to provide much needed help to students seeking to unlock the meaning of the texts with which they have to deal. (More elaborate notes are provided in lessons as part of my private tutoring business.)

Subject: The Memory Police meaning, The Memory Police themes, The Memory Police analysis, The Memory Police notes