When the pandemic first began I went on a run of reading or rereading classic science-fiction: lots of John Wyndham and H. G. Wells, trying pulp classics like Dracula for the first time (fun beginning, fun ending, otherwise a stodgy detective novel) or I Am Legend (very different to the Hollywood film). For some peverse reason, living in a dystopia only made more interested in fictional ones.
I also wanted to read beyond the usual suspects I’d grown up with. Yōko Ogawa is one of Japan’s most acclaimed novelists, but it’s fair to say she does not have a significant profile here in the UK. The Memory Police was shortlisted for the 2020 International Man Booker Prize (for works in translation) but the original was first published back in 1994. I had been meaning to read it for a while for professional reasons: one of the quotes on the cover compares the novel to Nineteen Eighty-Four and I work for a charity called The Orwell Foundation.
The comparison is an awkward one. The Memory Police has been described as a ‘dystopia’, but it is more like a slow, icy nightmare: comparisons have also been made with Kafka (who also came under my expanded definition of ‘sci fi’). The story takes place on an island which has long since disconnected from the mainland, and where a mysterious, intimidating police force intefere with the islanders’ relationship with the past: those who hold onto their memories live in constant fear of being found out and disappeared.
At the same time, entire categories of objects regularly disappear. They literally depart, as in one memorable image of the petals on all the island’s flowers flowing downriver, but they also lose their meaning for the inhabitants before they finally go, so that by the time they are gone the islanders do not even know what they are missing. In the case of human possessions, the islanders will often set about destroying the next set of objects en masse, seemingly without instruction, burning photographs and books in their gardens. It is never clear what role the Memory Police themselves are playing in these wider disappearences.
The Memory Police a remarkable book. There is none of the world-building, none of the political, social, or even psychological mechanisms you might expect from a dystopia and which are so important to a book like Nineteen Eighty-Four and so influential in shaping its reception. Things just happen. The Memory Police themselves have a walk-on role. They are a threat, especially to the few islanders who have the ability to remember, who they hunt down mercilessly, but otherwise seem to largely mind their own business. No one seems to know or care what is going on. This could be a comment on indifference as a means to survive in the face of political repression. But the novel reads more like a meditation on memory, on holding onto objects and the histories they carry (their smells, for instance) in the face of inevitable loss, than an explictly political statement.
Memory is not a theme science-fiction has any exclusive domain over. It’s easy to forget that Nineteen Eighty-Four is as ‘literary’ a book as any ‘literary fiction’: Nathan Waddell suggests in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four that the reason the novel has achieved that cultural status it has is not simply because the problems of power it poses but because of how engaged the book is with the process of writing itself - ‘with how literary production can be influenced by the most diabolical pressures.’
In The Memory Police, the connection between memory and literature is more explicit still: the main character is a writer, attempting to write a book which is slowly slipping away from them, who finds themselves having to hide their own editor from the Memory Police. In the absence of the usual dystopian rigging, and in the novel's sustained focus on domestic life, the pressure the characters are under feels less diabolical and more diffuse than in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but perhpas more chilling. Ogawa’s ‘Big Brother’ is time itself.