The worst thing that happens in The Memory Police isn’t the objects themselves disappearing; it’s the censorship and loss of freedom that comes with it. In the novel, Yoko Ogawa blends the horrors of reality with the fantastic. According to an article in the New York Times, Ogawa was fascinated with the Diary of Anne Frank as a child, and that fascination can easily be seen in The Memory Police. The Memory Police burn books and take people away to secret locations, and residents of the island who do not forget are forced to go into hiding or face the consequences. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if the residents don’t know what perfume or roses are — what matters is that they have memories attached to them. When these things disappear, the residents lose a part of themselves they can never get back. The narrator thinks early on about her father:
I think it’s fortunate that the birds were not disappeared until after my father died. Most people on the island found some other line of work quickly when a disappearance affected their job, but I don’t think that would have been the case for him. Identifying those wild creatures was his one true gift. (9)
When things disappear, the majority of the population completely loses the ability to remember them. This is the ultimate form of censorship; it’s not so much that they aren’t supposed to talk about it, but that they can’t. They literally have no choice but to go along with what the authority wants. This is what makes The Memory Police so interesting: it shows how some of the most outrageous, fantastic elements to stories, such as the literal disappearance of one’s body, can be rooted in reality and that the reality is more horrifying than the fiction.
I totally agree with your point that the most terrifying thing about the fantastic in fiction is the fact that it mirrors our own reality in so many ways; on the whole, this story feels like an expression of Ogawa’s own personal fears about the future–that, as time goes on, we will forget more and more of our history until we are eventually doomed to repeat it. The parallels to Diary of Anne Frank are also interesting to consider–and certainly more obvious to me now that you’ve pointed them out.
I agree that things are censored! It is shown when they are taken by the memory police and held captive until they do what the police want them to do. I also agree that she has a fascination, as she keeps bringing up people who could be summoned and even with people hiding people and getting in trouble for it.
It’s so interesting that you tie the horror of the relationship between reality and the fantastic, because of the possibility of truth. And how the reality of the book is actually far more dangerous than the fantastic / fiction element because of the way that it reflects on our world.
I really liked how you saw in the New York Times that this author was interested in the story Anne Frank and slightly compared her story to the idea of the Holocaust and WW2. It honestly gave me a new lens and perspective on the author’s motives and ideas. Great post!