asakiyume: (dewdrop)
I thought I'd translate the blurb of the original Japanese edition of The Memory Police, originally titled, 密やかな結晶 (hisoyaka na kesshō; The Hidden Crystal/The Secret Crystal), to show how the story was pitched when originally published, in its original language. Wakanomori checked it over and offered some good corrections.

『妊娠カレンダー』の芥川賞作家が澄明 に描く人間の哀しみ。記憶狩りによって消滅 が静かにすすむ島の生活。人は何をなくしたのかさえ思い出せない。何かをなくした小説ばかり書いているわたしも、言葉を、自分自身を確実に失っていった。有機物であることの人間の哀しみを澄んだまなざしで見つめ、現代の消滅、空無への願望を、美しく危険な情況の中で描く傑作長編

Human sadness, clearly portrayed by the Akutagawa Prize–winning author of Ninshin Karenda– [English-language edition title: Pregnancy Diary]. Daily life on an island where extinguishment peacefully advances through the harvesting of memories. People can't even remember what it is they've lost. The protagonist, who does nothing but write novels, is definitely losing her words and her very self. This masterwork casts its clear gaze on the sadness of human beings, who are mortal, and beautifully portrays the extinctions of the present age and the longing for nonbeing in dangerous circumstances.

... The translation is still pretty stilted. But you get the idea. "Dangerous" is the only word that even hints at the memory police!

Whereas, here's the tagline on the English-language book:

A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance

Here's the back cover copy:

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

To be fair, that last paragraph gets at more of what the book's like. But as [personal profile] troisoiseaux points out, if you go into the novel expecting "An Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance," you will likely be at the very least confused.
asakiyume: (miroku)
The 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,
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.

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