The Memory Police

The Memory Police is a science fiction novel by Yoko Ogawa. The Japanese edition debuted in 1994 and was translated into English by Stephen Snyder in 2019. Under the sci-fi umbrella, the novel more specifically belongs in the dystopian, or Orwellian, speculative fiction subgenre in that the story explores the quiet, quotidian results of scientific experimentation. In doing so, it considers themes like Memory and Manufacturing the Uncanny as well as Alienation Within a Police State, while the story-within-a-story structure contemplates The Craft of Writing. Ogawa’s style of reverie evokes Kazuo Ishiguro, and the text’s surreal qualities echo Haruki Murakami. The Memory Police was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

Plot Summary

At the start of The Memory Police, the unnamed protagonist recalls a childhood memory of her mother discussing the disappearances of objects on their island. Her mother remembers everything, unlike most people on the island, who forget the objects shortly after they disappear. The narrator’s father was an ornithologist. When birds disappeared, he lost his job, and the Memory Police searched their house for bird-related material.

In the present narrative, the narrator is a novelist working with an editor called R. Her parents are dead, and she is friends with her childhood nurse’s widower, a former ferry worker who is called the “old man.” An old family friend, Professor Inui, visits the narrator with his wife, daughter, and son. During their visit, the Memory Police raid the narrator’s house. At the Inuis’s request, the narrator takes some of her mother’s sculptures while they flee to a safehouse.

After learning that R remembers everything like her mother, the narrator and the old man build him a secret room—her father’s storage room, which the police overlooked in their search. R moves in, leaving his wife and newborn child behind, and they fall into a rhythm. Meanwhile, the narrator continues working on her manuscript, portions of which are included in the novel, about a typist and her typing teacher’s love affair.

One day, the police take the old man and question him about ferries. After he is returned, calendars disappear, and it continuously snows for the rest of the novel. R and the narrator begin an extramarital affair (R’s wife and newborn are unable to see him while he’s in hiding). Her manuscript, the story-within-a-story, continues: The typist, who has lost her voice, is held captive in a clocktower with a broken typewriter by her sadistic teacher.

Novels disappear, and books are burned. The narrator gets a job as a typist but agrees to R’s request that she continue working on her manuscript in secret. An earthquake and tsunami result in the old man being injured, but in the rubble, they discover that her mother’s sculptures—those left by the Inuis—held forgotten objects.

The old man moves in with the narrator, and they visit her mother’s country cabin to discover more objects hidden in her art. After a close call with the Memory Police at the train station, they bring the objects to R’s secret room. The old man dies from his untreated injuries, and the narrator manages to write some lines of poetry during sleepless nights.

Body parts begin to disappear, starting with left legs and spreading to right arms. The narrator manages to finish her manuscript: The voiceless typist is absorbed by the hidden clockworks room in the tower, and her former teacher takes another woman captive to replace her.

R tries to help the narrator remember her disappeared body, but her voice vanishes after she tells him to rejoin the world, certain that the Memory Police have also lost their bodies. He leaves her as she continues to disappear into the secret room.