The memory police - yōko ogawa
“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.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police
"The Memory Police" by Yoko Ogawa is a story about the inhabitants of an island where 'the memory police' make objects on the islands disappear. They make the objects dissappear from the inhabitants minds, and force them to get rid of the physical objects. Through the book, the objects that dissappear become more and more significant, starting with things like hats, then roses and birds go, novels, and eventually their bodies start to dissappear.
I thought the concept was very interesting, but the book didn't really live up to my expectations. It doesn't really have a clear plot, it just describes what life would be like in a situation like this, which I kinda like because it's cozy somehow, but I just feel like the idea had more potential. There's no why or how behind the memory police, and I just have a lot of unanswered questions.
The "romance" at the end also seems to be neglected a bit. It wasn't entirely unnecessary, I think it makes sense for R and the main character to be together in kind of a trauma bond type of way, but there was, again, just no context. For example, R had a wife and newborn child, which was I think mentioned in, 1?, sentence regarding their relationship? Did they just not care at all?
Besides all this, I really enjoyed reading it. D3ath is also a recurring theme, with both her parents and the old man, which blends in weirdly smooth because the entire book is about loss. I guess I personally like reading about themes like that because, sadly, d3ath was also a recurring theme in my childhood lmao. The woman writing a story within the book was really cool too, the way her story was a metaphor for the things she was going through, and how the woman in her story lost her voice first while the last thing she herself had was her voice. I'm also pretty sure there's some bigger maybe political message behind this that I'm just too uneducated and autistic for to understand, and definitely too scared to actually speak on, so I won't ✨️
(All pics are from pinterest)
