Book Review: Remembering Mortality in "The Memory Police"
Celebrating our mortality in a never-ending snowstorm
By Jared Feuer and Colleen Eren
In 1994, the Japanese author Yōko Ogawa published her first novel, Hisoyaka na kesshō, an approximate translation of which is Secret Crystallization. After Ogawa made her name internationally over the subsequent quarter-century, her debut novel was finally translated into English as The Memory Police in 2019. Reviewers took the hint, declaring that the publication was timed to coincide with the Trump Administration and a rise in authoritarianism. Time Magazine’s list of 2019 notable books sandwiched The Memory Police between Colson Whitehead and Ibram X. Kendi, listing Ogawa as contemporaries of Orwell and Bradbury. The Washington Post invokes the exact same authors and Ploughshares continues the theme:
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, dystopian novels that explore overreaching states, have skyrocketed in sales since Trump’s inauguration, as readers seek to remind themselves of what almost was (the implications of losing world wars) and what might come to be (totalitarian leadership). Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police...., is a newer entry to the genre but one with a speculative bend…The government, through its faceless Memory Police department, achieves a kind of mass thought control.
On and on. University of Michigan’s art journal sees in The Memory Police the “modern state’s totalitarian proclivities to create a political order founded on the organizational principle of fear” and the reviewer reflects, “I finished reading the book in December of last year when the news channels reverberated with Donald Trump’s insistence to build his beautiful wall, a testimony to the President’s resolve to offend the dignity and attack the rights of immigrants and refugees.” The New York Times, in profiling Ogawa and the book, reminds us, “the novel is particularly resonant now, at a time of rising authoritarianism across the globe. Throughout the book, citizens live under police surveillance. Novels are burned. People are detained and interrogated without explanation. Neighbors are taken away in the middle of the night.” It is even discussed as a kind of meditation on immanent ecological catastrophe in an era of climate change in another Times review, which declared, “Ogawa’s ruminant style captures the alienation of being alive as the world’s ecosystems, ice sheets, languages, animal species and possible futures vanish more quickly than any one mind can apprehend.”
You get the point.
What the reviewers do not consider, odd at a time where cultural distinction is to be upheld, is that such readings are not only anachronist, but uniquely American political readings. Ogawa herself has expressed surprise at the connections made between her book and U.S. politics, noting that such political statements were not her intention. Influences on her writing have been less of George Orwell, and more of fellow Japanese surrealist author Haruki Murakami, existentialist/magic realist American author Paul Aster, or the French author attempting to capture emotional states such as suffering and desire, Marguerite Duras.
By naming, marketing, and reviewing The Memory Police as a treatise on contemporary authoritarianism (Trump), the literary world ironically falls victim to its own authoritarianism. In this worldview, every component of existence, including art, must be a soldier in a political deathmatch. And so they rename and clip the wings of a book in which birds literally disappear. Consequently, they miss the heart of what should have retained the name Secret Crystallization - an embrace of mortality in a tragic but beautiful tale of how we all disappear. Such a reading falls squarely into the Japanese artistic philosophy “Mono No Aware.” Influenced by Buddhism, this philosophy embraces the impermanence that is our birthright, and can be loosely translated as ‘the sadness and pathos of things.’ It is the acute, painful, and yet simultaneously beautiful aesthetic appreciation of what must inevitably change and pass, a philosophy that clearly undergirds the novel.
As reviewers, we both come from advocacy and rights backgrounds, with Colleen ultimately focusing on academics and Jared the NGO sphere. Over the course of our careers, we have found that the truth and beauty that both fields once upheld has been forfeit to overt politicization and myopic interpretative schemes that favor preferred narratives. We fear the same fate is befalling other areas of life, including the arts. With this review we are amplifying a different perspective: the humanity with which we are all gifted. What follows are spoilers, so if you want to read the novel, consider turning away. That said, the plot of the book is simple and not based on revelation but on feeling and seeing.
The novel is short, under 300 pages, and reads like an impressionist painting; the details are left imprecise and yet are vividly depicted and emotionally resonant. The plot is similarly impressionist - on a small, nameless, location-less island, in an unknown but modern time period , residents occasionally wake to discover that facets of life have disappeared. At first these facets are external and for the most part, inconsequential: perfume, emeralds, hats, or roses. But as the book continues, the cuts get deeper as the centrality of the facets to human experience increases - calendars vanish, and with it, seasons - trapping residents in winter. Photographs disappear, impairing the ability of the characters to recall their past. Eventually parts of the body disappear until only voices are left, and then, presumably, consciousness will disappear.
While disappearances are not apparently initiated by a human force, the titular Memory Police serve as enforcers in their wake. The items do not vanish physically as much as the residents' use of them concludes along with their purpose. The space they occupied in the heart and mind, their sensory power, is forgotten. Consequently, the Memory Police supervise the physical removal of the items, such as the burning of books in public bonfires after novels disappear. Items that remain are considered contraband, and are efficiently but ruthlessly, removed by the memory police. Some people, however, retain their ability to “remember” the disappeared objects and have to hide lest they be removed themselves by the Memory Police.
The main characters are few and nameless in a work where all details are eventually wiped clean. The narrator is a young novelist, the daughter of an artist who we discover later has hidden ‘disappeared’ items within the plaster of her sculptures She befriends an “old man” and hides her editor, “R,” in her home, akin to Anne Frank, when she discovers that he retains the ability to remember. The book that the narrator is writing within Ogawa’s novel, and which is told in sections throughout, describes a woman who loses her voice and becomes dependent on a typewriter to communicate, before becoming prisoner of her typing instructor and eventually disappearing into the typewriter itself. In this way the novel and the novel within are inverses - genders, order of disappearances, roles, etc. - are flipped. But regardless of where the protagonist stands, they eventually disappear, the voices are eventually silenced.
The action in the novel is limited, as Secret Crystallization is in essence a novel about how humans come to terms with life and create meaning in the face of aging, loss, and eventually, death. As the residents of the island gradually lose mental, emotional, and physical functionality and the opportunity for experiences, so too do we all experience how our lives are narrowed by the day. The Memory Police are a reverse type of antibodies, or even a form of cancer, quietly but ruthlessly ensuring that the process continues unabated. In the face of the disappearances, the islanders remain resolute, cheery even. When their left leg ‘disappears’ they gamely limp along, making the best of it.
What stands out against this gradually disappearing landscape, represented in the omnipresent snow that covers the island in a quiet white shroud, are those few who remember and insist on the importance of memory, such as the narrator’s mother, or her editor, R. At the end of the story, he emerges into a lost world. They are what we leave behind, our chroniclers, akin to the sandstone that remains when the topography has been otherwise weathered. They could even be thought of as novelists or historians. They make a claim to immortality, or at least emphasize the importance of recollecting and celebrating the accumulated cultural birthrights that we inherit in an otherwise temporary existence. Even with their isolated presence, or perhaps because of its illumination of just how much has been lost, the landscape ends up desolate.
This is the natural order of things, of course, for us, all our artifacts and cultural representations to disappear eventually, as Shelley captured two hundred years ago in Ozymandius. Humanity is tied to its fate, regardless of who we are or what we believe. Over the past century, as our religiosity has declined, and with it the answers that have plugged the hole in humanity’s existential despair since the onset of civilization, we have busied ourselves creating new gods. Social media stars, celebrities, politicians, as the divine; theories, answers, politics, identities, as temples. We cling to them, zealously, and attack rivals as false gods. Nonetheless, MAGA and BLM and Antifa and The Great Replacement and Social Justice and every other worldview that we cling to are strurm und drang, shouts into the oblivion. What’s worse, these supposed lifelines offer no real solace for the soul, while pulling us from each other.
There is another path, however, and it’s portrayed in Secret Crystallization. With the Memory Police literally at the front door, the three main characters hold a last supper/birthday party where they gather what is left and appreciate the simplest items as though they are the greatest delicacy. The narrator shares the moment of blowing out the candle on the cake:
We huddled still closer together as it grew dark, and I could feel the heat of the little flames on my cheeks. Darkness spread out behind, like a soft veil of shadows shrouding the three of us and keeping out the noise and cold and wind, all trace of the outside world. In here, there was only our breath and the gently flickering flames.
The prescription put forward by Ogawa is as simple as her technical prose. And it is hardly a ‘political’ solution, as would be necessary if one were to read the novel as a statement exclusively against authoritarianism. We can find delight with each other. We can bond, accept and even embrace the inherent tragedy of life but never lose joy or wonder in existence. The price of not doing so can be seen all around us - the shallowness of social media and fame, the self-righteous ideologies that divide and anger. We have become so captured by this perspective that critic after critic turned a work about the essence of our humanity into the politics of the day. What is compelled is humility in the face of mortality - a traditional value present in all cultures. Without these gravitational forces we have turned to false gods to create meaning. Taking a different approach requires unlearning, losing attachment to ego and tribe, and frankly, bravery to celebrate our mortality in a never-ending snowstorm. If we can, we will find beauty and true solidarity.