The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa represents an experience everyone goes through at some point in their lives. 
Though many may handle it differently, the idea of loss penetrates our bubbles of happiness when we least expect it. On an island, a group of people named The Memory Police will take things at random from the world. When that item, idea, or person is removed, so are the memories that remind them of what was lost. Though the novel can be read as political (the government is taking over our lives), it can actually read as the tale of death and loss.
When we lose people, things we associate with them no longer move us like they used to. This can tie back to when her father, an ornithologist, passes, the narrator forgets about birds. After the removal of a person, we begin to remove other things from our memories. Friends can fade, objects are lost and feelings are forgotten. A very natural thing that happens to all who go through it.
At the end of the story, our narrator has vanished herself. Parts of her body fade until she is just a voice, then that fades away too. The understanding that we can sometimes forget who we are when we’ve lost something shows in those final pages. We don’t know how to mourn or if we even should. We deny that they are actually really gone. In short, we lose a bit of ourselves when we lose something important. The Memory Police does a great job of conveying these emotions through every character. The characters who still remember can be based on people who handle grief differently; loss doesn’t phase them as much as it does everyone else. The Memory Police themselves may be no more than the physical embodiment of loss that eventually devours every living thing.
I never considered the possibility that the Memory Police could also be a metaphor for loss itself–the desire to erase all memory of a beloved person, place, or thing that is now gone. It definitely makes me feel more sympathetic towards them in a way that I was unable to be before.
I agree with the idea that the loss of material items in this story could be comparable to the realistic loss that comes with living life in general. It definitely makes the story affect the reader more emotionally.
I never read it as a story of government takeover, but I can see now why it could be. I saw it as a book of how quickly and easily we can lose things and forget them. Life is fragile, and to be remembered when you are gone is a life well-lived.
I read this novel as both a government takeover and loss. It seems as though the people, who could remember or try to remember, would hold on to the object that was removed in order to keep a part of that memory. It was as if they were holding onto them past selves. As the saying goes, “knowledge is power,” the objects they hold (like her mother with perfume) is a part of them that the Memory Police cannot take away. By remembering the items, she is different from everybody else that just goes along with the eradication of that item.