What are we without our memories? Would you rather forget or remember?
On the Japanese novel 'The Memory Police' by Yoko Ogawa
From the moment we are born we collect memories we forget until we are able to remember them. Then at some point, we seemingly become incapable of forgetting, and remembering is all we do.
The smell of your father’s aftershave and his cigarettes, the distinct feel of your mother’s calloused yet crafty hands, a hug, a kiss, a grudge, the accumulating dust in that crevice in your childhood home that was somehow never cleaned out, a cringe-worthy embarrassing moment you cannot shake off, the ghostly sound of laughter gone quiet forever.
We hold onto memories for dear life, believing they can save us, believing they make us. Eventually, we also get better at forgetting. We forget bodily pain, the promises we make, the many second chances we give, the hurt others cause us, the dreams we once had, the crimes of a dictator. But forgetting is also forced upon us. It comes naturally with age or sometimes, cruelly, with disease or injury, ultimately inevitable.
If you had a choice, would you rather forget or remember?
This is the overarching question Japanese author Yoko Ogawa ostensibly forces readers to consider with her novel The Memory Police, published in 1994 and translated to English in 2019. Are memories best kept or let go? Do we want to remember everything – the good and the bad – and carry them with us forever? Or is it better to forget, not drag around baggage along with us?
In Ogawa’s novel, an island exists where people are under the control of the Memory Police, who have the power to make things disappear for good, including all of the people’s memories associated with them. Residents on the island are used to things disappearing, seemingly at random. They wake up one morning with a feeling that something has been disappeared (it’s a curious thing using this form of the word as a verb), then they are compelled to get rid of any and all of whatever it is straight away; either by burning it or throwing it out to sea or handing it over to the Memory Police – or simply by watching it naturally drift or fly away into the horizon. Soon enough, they would not be able to recall anything about the object and would never again know what it was called or its purpose or function. Even if they somehow saw it again, they wouldn’t be able to identify the object and would feel ambivalent towards it. This happens for everyday objects such as hats or even living creatures such as birds, and everything in between.
While reading, you very quickly feel a lump in your throat with each memory lost. There is a realisation of the diversity and infinity of what tethers us to the world, of how we leave pieces of ourselves on many things around us as we move about living, and of what those things mean to us.
What disappears is not self-contained. People are not simply forgetting that such an object or concept ever existed, they are also forgetting any and all emotional attachment to it. As with the reality of our existence, many things carry with them traces of our interactions with people and the world. In the novel, when something is disappeared, what’s also effectively taken away are memories of the afternoon spent bonding over that something with your parents, the gratitude toward a loved one who made that something especially for you, the warm feeling of belonging or love whenever you see that something. Pieces of the self are lost.
Quiet, internal dissent
The Memory Police don’t just make things vanish. They also ensure nothing is remembered. They hunt down and capture people who are unable to forget, a dystopian crackdown on dissent that’s heinously personal and invasive on a whole new level of sinister. For reasons that are never made clear, some people on the island are not affected by the disappearances. They are able to retain their memories. Out of fear of being captured, these people play along with the majority who do forget, pretending they, too, have lost their memories, trying to blend in and feign obliviousness.
And this is where Ogawa gets right to a crux of human nature: the power of remembrance. To remember is fundamental to resistance, to remember is to reject injustice, to remember is to cling to hope. Remembering is crucial to a lot of humanity’s progress. This is also why anyone out for power and control knows to muddle people’s memories and revise history for their benefit.
In Ogawa’s novel, there is no physical or mass dissent. All resistance is individual or occasionally in very small groups of solidarity and aid. All protests are done quietly, internally. One such dissenting character is R, the editor of the main character who is a novelist. When it is revealed that R can maintain his memories, the main character along with a longtime friend conspire to save him from the Memory Police. They hide him in a small secret room in the protagonist’s house.
R despairs the loss of memories. He believes in their power and their value. Besides his capacity to remember – in itself an act of protest – his dissent comes in the form of his hope that the protagonist and her friend would find their way back to even just one memory. He insists on facilitating their recollection, patiently describing and explaining about disappeared objects, hoping to jog their memory. There is none of your garden-variety aggressive conflict here (perhaps because of the overwhelming sense of ambivalence throughout the story – ostensibly linked to all the forgetting), but the main character naturally poses the question to R: is it even worth remembering what’s already been forgotten?
The secret room itself is an obvious metaphor. R, with all his memories, is tucked away in this tiny space in the house, almost like a corner of the mind. In time, actual disappeared objects – memories – also join him. R’s room full of forgotten objects, attached to no warm familiarity or basic recognition at all except his own, inevitably come off simply as a room full of useless clutter to the protagonist and her friend.
What are we without our memories?
Can you imagine what it must be like to not have a history? To not know how humanity got here, to not know what came before all of us? Can you imagine what it would be like to never be able to accumulate memories while you live?
What are we without our memories? This is the question Ogawa implicitly makes one contemplate through her novel. It begs to be recognised when R justifies to the main character why memories matter, and it is there in every attempt to resist the Memory Police through preservation. Without memories, are we just empty vessels walking on earth, aimless? Never fully alive?
As I flipped through the pages of this book and wondered what might disappear next, I finally arrived at a chapter that gave me a glimpse of my own true nightmare. There it was: a cold, dark chapter in which novels were disappeared. I saw it coming when previous chapters showed people losing objects tied to their professions, but it was still painful to read. The protagonist, being a novelist, had been trying to finish her manuscript. She continued to work with her editor as she hid him in her own home. When novels were disappeared, the novelist had nothing else. She forced herself to write something, anything, but it was a gruelling and painful endeavour that led nowhere. It’s a cruel irony that the novelist herself is unable to keep memories and stories through her writing.
The chapter made me think about stories in general, in whatever form they come, not just novels. Humanity has survived on storytelling: from the stories we tell ourselves and one another that lead to widespread faith in a higher being, to the ones that have us collectively believe in the significance of pieces of paper with numbers so we spend our whole lives working to earn them. Of course, there are also the stories – of kindness, courage, cowardice and cruelty – we tell about each other, passed along generations, preserved in individual and collective memory. There is no humanity without stories. And, it seems, no stories without memory. To lose stories forever is my idea of true tragedy.
—
The disappearances seemed harmless at first. After all, we do not and cannot know of everything there is to know in the world, and not knowing is not always detrimental to us. We carry on. But in The Memory Police, with every disappearance, it becomes increasingly clear that there is a cost to it all. A debt is incurred and paid for in the loose threads of people’s beings, and in their minds that unravel at the seams with every unceremonious loss.
At some point in the story, a thought is floated around: can the Memory Police disappear humans?
Will they?
Your neighbour, once a jolly presence on Saturday mornings, gone, along with the smiles. Your friend, once the person you could rely on for anything, suddenly no longer exists. Your partner, who made you feel seen every single day, no more. But unlike loss through death, there would be no grief. How could you grieve, how could you honour someone, if you do not remember them?
What of your own self?
—
We aren’t privy to the details of how the Memory Police are able to make things disappear. The protagonist and her friend remain unnamed in the same way we can forget people’s names. We never know R’s full name, we never see what the Memory Police look like, we never know what lies beyond the island’s borders, we never know who’s pulling the strings nor the reason for any of it. The approach is refreshing and serves the story well. There is no need to rationalise or justify the world Ogawa built. It just is.
The novel itself then also becomes a metaphor for the mind and the nature of memory: fragmented, hazy, uncertain, grasping. We do not have a real choice here. We cannot simply decide to not remember something or make our memories disappear, try as we might – though that can be quite an appealing proposition the farther along one walks through life.
So if and only if you had a choice, would you rather forget or remember? Is remembering everything – the pain and the joy – worth the trouble?
What would you be without your memories? Are your memories worth it?
In the end, Ogawa – whose writing style in this novel gives off a mesmerising, dreamlike quality – quietly tells us that memories, for better or worse, make us alive.
Even when memories are forcibly ripped away from someone – through natural causes or through traumatic accidents or, if you will, through the Memory Police – and they themselves cannot grasp their own mind, they live on through the memories of the people around them. You may lose all recollection, but I think of you, I know you, I remember you, and so I see you.
Memories are what keep anyone alive long after they’re gone – stories loudly told, written or whispered and carried with the wind, far and wide, through time and space.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis…
If you haven’t read my welcome post, I mentioned that I’d like to conduct an experiment: for every essay, I will include a piece about the climate crisis so we’re in the loop even when we’re lost in our own rabbit holes. So here we go.
Climate migration has begun. This isn’t something that’s in the public consciousness just yet (or perhaps it is, for those living in places often affected by climate-related disasters), what with the many immediately pressing reasons for migration (political, economic, conflict, etc.), but it will be eventually. It’s honestly terrifying to imagine. This piece from The New York Times is one of my favourite pieces of climate journalism. It provides an overview of what climate migration would look like, where populations might go and who might those people be, as well as what’s already starting to happen now. It’s a long one and part of a larger series of stories but definitely worth the read.
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See you down another rabbit hole!