The Memory Police
Sep. 25th, 2020 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asakiyumeThe Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa
Japanese title: 密やかな結晶 [The secret/quiet/hidden crystal]
Original Japanese cover
The English title, jacket copy, and advertising totally misrepresent this novel. Yes, the memory police are present and as awful as you’d expect; yes, the protagonist, a novelist, hides her editor away, Anne Frank style. But this isn’t a novel about a dystopia or oppression—those elements are incidental. It’s fundamentally about forgetting, loss, and (because it’s the ultimate loss) death. What does it mean to remember? What does it mean to forget? When people who remember interact with people who can’t, it’s very painful—we know this from real life—but it’s a pain we embrace. If you’re going down by the minute, if you’re being diminished bit by bit, it doesn’t mean you can’t love. There’s an awful lot of resignation in this book, but there’s love too, and some characters stoutly stake out positions of hope.
R, the protagonist’s editor, who needs to be hidden because he can remember the things that have disappeared, says,
To which the narrator replies, poignantly,
The mechanism for the (f)act of disappearing is a little nebulous. People wake up knowing something has “been disappeared,” but in many cases it’s up to them to get rid of the thing—as with photographs, or (unfortunately for the protagonist) novels. They feel a compulsion to dispose of the items—it’s terribly sad:
And when things like birds disappear, people simply stop understanding what birds are. Sometimes they can be made to remember, but it’s an arduous process and it doesn’t stick very well.
Here I need to take a brief digression to talk about fruit. Fruit disappear about a third of the way through the book:
To my intense botherment, the protagonist continues to refer to fruit throughout the whole rest of the novel—when theoretically she should barely be able to articulate the word (we witness examples of this with “hat” and “photograph”). She talks about burning a novel whose cover has a picture of fruit on it, she regrets that she can’t get strawberries for a birthday cake (without acknowledging that this is because they’ve disappeared), she smells something that reminds her of rotten fruit, and finally at one point the characters are actually eating slices of apple. What the heck?
It’s hard to believe that an editor would let this slip past—if I’d been Ogawa’s editor, I definitely would have queried this—so my best way of understanding it is that the disappearances aren’t total—that just as birds continue to exist, so does fruit—but not in a way that is reliably accessible to the characters. It’s like how sometimes you can do some processes unconsciously because they’ve become part of muscle memory, but if you try to do them consciously, you get tangled up.
In that sense, the novel is brilliant in creating in you the ragged, tattered sense that losing memories, losing your sense of the world, produces in people.
In the novel the protagonist is writing, which has some parallels with the life she’s experiencing, there’s an actual malevolent agent, a force behind the diminishment and erasure that’s lacking in the protagonist’s actual life … and in the novel we read, the memory police play a similar role. They do assuredly make existence worse on the nameless island that’s the location for the story—but they’re not the cause of the disappearances. They’re a big problem, but they’re not the central problem, which, I’d argue, is this: if you can see the end coming—your personal end, or the end of the whole world, or both—if it’s coming step by step, ineluctably … How are you going to face it? The answer the novel offers is a moving tribute to pricelessness of personal connections and the strength of weak things.
Yoko Ogawa
Japanese title: 密やかな結晶 [The secret/quiet/hidden crystal]
Original Japanese cover
The English title, jacket copy, and advertising totally misrepresent this novel. Yes, the memory police are present and as awful as you’d expect; yes, the protagonist, a novelist, hides her editor away, Anne Frank style. But this isn’t a novel about a dystopia or oppression—those elements are incidental. It’s fundamentally about forgetting, loss, and (because it’s the ultimate loss) death. What does it mean to remember? What does it mean to forget? When people who remember interact with people who can’t, it’s very painful—we know this from real life—but it’s a pain we embrace. If you’re going down by the minute, if you’re being diminished bit by bit, it doesn’t mean you can’t love. There’s an awful lot of resignation in this book, but there’s love too, and some characters stoutly stake out positions of hope.
R, the protagonist’s editor, who needs to be hidden because he can remember the things that have disappeared, says,
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 ... 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.
To which the narrator replies, poignantly,
I don't even know what I should be remembering. What's gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That's why I'm jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles."
The mechanism for the (f)act of disappearing is a little nebulous. People wake up knowing something has “been disappeared,” but in many cases it’s up to them to get rid of the thing—as with photographs, or (unfortunately for the protagonist) novels. They feel a compulsion to dispose of the items—it’s terribly sad:
The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn. They drive me to burn things and I can stop only when everything is in ashes
And when things like birds disappear, people simply stop understanding what birds are. Sometimes they can be made to remember, but it’s an arduous process and it doesn’t stick very well.
Here I need to take a brief digression to talk about fruit. Fruit disappear about a third of the way through the book:
The disappearance of fruit was much simpler. When we woke in the morning, fruit of every sort was falling from trees all over the island. A pattering sound could be heard everywhere, and in the northern hills and the forest part, fruit came down like a hailstorm.
To my intense botherment, the protagonist continues to refer to fruit throughout the whole rest of the novel—when theoretically she should barely be able to articulate the word (we witness examples of this with “hat” and “photograph”). She talks about burning a novel whose cover has a picture of fruit on it, she regrets that she can’t get strawberries for a birthday cake (without acknowledging that this is because they’ve disappeared), she smells something that reminds her of rotten fruit, and finally at one point the characters are actually eating slices of apple. What the heck?
It’s hard to believe that an editor would let this slip past—if I’d been Ogawa’s editor, I definitely would have queried this—so my best way of understanding it is that the disappearances aren’t total—that just as birds continue to exist, so does fruit—but not in a way that is reliably accessible to the characters. It’s like how sometimes you can do some processes unconsciously because they’ve become part of muscle memory, but if you try to do them consciously, you get tangled up.
In that sense, the novel is brilliant in creating in you the ragged, tattered sense that losing memories, losing your sense of the world, produces in people.
In the novel the protagonist is writing, which has some parallels with the life she’s experiencing, there’s an actual malevolent agent, a force behind the diminishment and erasure that’s lacking in the protagonist’s actual life … and in the novel we read, the memory police play a similar role. They do assuredly make existence worse on the nameless island that’s the location for the story—but they’re not the cause of the disappearances. They’re a big problem, but they’re not the central problem, which, I’d argue, is this: if you can see the end coming—your personal end, or the end of the whole world, or both—if it’s coming step by step, ineluctably … How are you going to face it? The answer the novel offers is a moving tribute to pricelessness of personal connections and the strength of weak things.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 11:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 11:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 12:29 am (UTC)Anyway, the book sounds super interesting, but maybe a little more focused on the tragedy of memory issues than I want right now... but I'll keep in in the back of my mind for the future, maybe.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 02:09 am (UTC)I think I've maybe overstated the tragedy of the book (but maybe not? I mean... it's pretty tragic)--there are some very sweet moments too.
....
Yeah, no, upon reflection, I don't think I'm overstating it.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 11:59 pm (UTC)I think it might be impossible for me to read this book, at least at the present time, but I am glad it is as good as it is. Characters referring to fruit or birds out of a kind of reflex, failing to make the connection to the concepts' counterparts in the world, does sound effectively disorienting.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 02:00 am (UTC)... But then again, maybe that, too, is reflective of the sort of tatters your thoughts can get into.
Yeah, I think it could definitely be hard to read, right now. I keep on trying to articulate in this comment why/how I was able to read it without being destroyed, and ... I realize I don't actually know why (or maybe I don't like the implications...)
no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 03:08 am (UTC)I don't see why you should have to be destroyed just because I would be upset. Different people have different reactions.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 07:12 pm (UTC)I'm thinking I should translate the Japanese blurb of the book--it doesn't even MENTION the memory police.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 07:14 pm (UTC)You should! I'd love to see the comparison.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 06:39 pm (UTC)+1.
I have learned from comparative experience that I am not upset by narrative material that many people find difficult to intolerable. I have a couple of land mines in places where very few other people have them. That's just natural variation.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 06:48 pm (UTC)"Infinite diversity in infinite combinations." A cornerstone of Vulcan philosophy.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 06:36 pm (UTC)I don't think that's a useful way to think of it. There are conventions of human emotion and reaction and very few of them, as far as I can tell, map on the multiplicity of real human emotion and reaction as opposed to the training that people receive in how to present or mask themselves so that other people can read them. It would be a different question if we were talking about a consistent lack of empathy, or the inability to recognize even intellectually the existence of other people's pain. (I am a big proponent of the fact that you don't need to be physically upset by someone else's distress to decide to do something about it.) Since that's not at stake, don't beat yourself up, or allow societal expectations to do the beating for you. I have been called not human because of some of the things I am not upset by. Unfortunately, since no extraterrestrial observers have yet claimed me, I am forced to conclude the spectrum of human emotion is just very wide.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 07:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 01:49 am (UTC)My main memory of this book is feeling literally, physically woozy with horror at the scene where she discovers left (or right?) legs have Been Disappeared, both because of the eerie description and because I was fully convinced that she was going to have to actually amputate it.
I was slightly frustrated by the lack of answers - especially because the novel kept hinting at there being some rhyme or reason behind at least some of the disappearances (the leg made it easier to tell who was faking the lack of memory; something about seasons disappearing/a never-ending winter, iirc?) - but I realized about halfway through that I was reading it with the expectations of an American dystopian novel, in which the narrator would a. be one of the special few who keep their memories and b. lead a revolution against The Man.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 02:07 am (UTC)I started out reading it with totally wrong expectations of a more general nature, namely, I was reading it like a genre novel, one that's going to be interested in exploring the premise it sets up.... and it wasn't that kind of a novel either. It doesn't care about why the disappearances are happening--how can it not care??? And then I was like, okay, that is not what I'm getting here, so what **is** here?
But yeah, there's no Man! There's no government whatsoever! There's *only* the memory police. No one talks about talking to the mayor or the governor or the chief minister or anything. And everyone just acquiesces to whatever is going to happen. The *only* resistance anyone does is to hide others.
That scene with the legs was super creepy and effective.