I’m not always aware why I choose a particular book to read. I have favourite authors — don’t we all? — and I have “types” of novels I enjoy and/or admire more than others; although I’m not entirely sure how I would define “type”. And then there are those books about which I know nothing, but something persuades me to give them a go. This does not always result in books worth reading.
The Memory Police (1994, trans. 2019, Japan) by Yoko Ogawa is a case in point. A novel can be distanced from a reader by place, the product of a different culture, one with which the reader may not be familiar, or, if they do have knowledge, it’s only superficial. Add in time, and the difference is compounded. The Memory Police was originally published in 1994, twenty-seven years ago, but not published in an English edition until two years ago. Japan has undoubtedly changed a great deal during that quarter-century. Certainly the UK, the entire English-speaking world, has done so.
Without an encyclopaedic knowledge of Japan’s recent history, and its culture, it’s hard to know what to make of The Memory Police. Japan, it strikes me, is a nation that has recognised its past shameful behaviour (unlike, say, either the UK or US), and has made an effort to address those elements of its culture which led to the historical incidents the nation would sooner forget. (Such feelings are not universal, of course, in any of the three nations so far mentioned.) Further, while The Memory Police is a commentary on “imposed” forgetting, and the use of history as a political weapon — something that is very much relevant here and now in the UK and US — The Memory Police is not, like Mishima’s fiction, for example, lamenting that “lost” history, or refusing to accept those past acts were shameful.
The novel is set in an unnamed seaside town on an island (off the coast of Japan). An organ of the state called the Memory Police seems to have the ability to cause people to forget words. But not it seems, the associated concepts; at least not initially. So when the narrator, a young woman who lives alone, forgets the word “bird”, and realises it is the latest word the Memory Police have taken away, she still recognises birds for what they are.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been much used, and abused, in Anglophone science fiction, the best-known example perhaps being Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao (1958, USA). Obviously, Anglophone science fiction does not map onto Japanese literary fiction — Ogawa doesn’t identify as a genre writer, although such distinctions likely do not exist in Japanese literature. Most importantly, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been soundly debunked.
The Memory Police does not fully subscribe to the hypothesis. The Memory Police remove words from the minds of the population of the island — the mechanism is never described or explained — but in many cases what that word signifies still remains. But not always. So the narrator knows what a ferry is and does, even though the word has been removed; but other objects she cannot identify after the word has gone. It makes no sense.
The actual plot is more or less irrelevant. The narrator hides a neighbour, in a secret room in her house, who is one of those rare individuals whose memory is not affected by the Memory Police. As, it seems, was the narrator’s late mother. The Memory Police documents the island’s shrinking vocabulary, to the extent where people can no longer look after themselves, a situation compounded by ongoing food shortages.
A chapter into The Memory Police and I didn’t get its premise. I continued reading, expecting something to appear which would either make sense of the story or, at the very least, provide some sort of link between premise and plot. Neither appeared. And I found the premise increasingly implausible as the novel progressed. How can the Memory Police remove the word “ferry” from the islanders, but the narrator still knows what the semi-sunken ship in the harbour is, and what it was used for? And later in the novel, why does she not recognise something for which the word had been removed?
In the final chapter, things take a turn for the absurd. The Memory Police remove the word for left leg (is it a single word in Japanese? I don’t know), and people start to limp and drag their left foot. It… doesn’t make sense. How can you censor a concept like “left leg” when the leg remains firmly attached to the body?
There is certainly much to be explored in the human propensity to recast events, history, in a light which better suits sensibilities or agenda. Likewise for organisations and governments. Not just the Soviet government erasing individuals from photographs, or “the disappeared” of various nations, or even the concept of “history is written by the winners”… Currently in the UK, if someone pushes over a statue of, say, Winston Churchill and it kills a person, they’d get a longer sentence for toppling the statue than they would for the death. Statues are not history. There are, as has been repeatedly pointed out, no statues of Hitler, but he has not disappeared from the history books, and the depredations of his regime are still very much known in Europe. (Germany is another nation which acknowledges its shame over its history.)
The Memory Police are, quite literally, thought police. They dictate what the islanders can, and cannot, think. Through a gradual reduction of vocabulary, they maintain control. As a concept, it feels like a commentary on history and how it’s recorded and perceived. But its application in the novel is so haphazard and implausible, it’s hard to know what the story is actually supposed to be about.
The past is a foreign country, as LP Hartley said, “they do things differently there”. Japan is certainly a foreign country to a British reader. I may be missing something pertinent in The Memory Police, I may be missing knowledge which allows me to discern what it is actually about… but by publishing The Memory Police for the first time in English twenty-seven years after the novel first appeared, without any sort of commentary, it has no context. It is clearly not a story that works without context.
There’s probably a word for that.
But if there is, I can’t remember what it is.
