There is something of a terrible twist to reality in Ogawa’s The Memory Police. It isn’t just that things disappear, but that almost every person disappears entirely. And in a way, that is true to life. Although, disappearance in real life is typically not so sudden. But it made me think of the movie Amadeus and the character of Salieri. He had a line regarding why he wanted to become a composer, and it was so that his works would continue to live on long after his death. It was to be remembered so that history would not lose him along the way. In a sense, Ogawa’s work gets right to that idea.
The narrator, her mother, and R all have a connection to art and memory. The narrator is a novelist who seems to chronicle disappearances of her own kind in her works. This time she is writing about a typist who loses first her voice and ends up being locked away in a room with nothing but the care of her former typing tutor. At first it seemed like a parallel to R’s situation, at least until the loss of novels. A short while after the novels are lost, body parts begin to go. We are finally treated to the conclusion of her novel, finding the main character becomes completely absorbed by the room that she is locked in. In a sort of ironic parallel, the narrator loses everything except her voice. There is almost a preservation of her experience in the closing chapter of the narrator’s novel, if not a preservation of her being.
Her mother preserves memory through her art as well, although in a much more literal sense. She hid the things that disappeared in some of her sculptures so that when broken open the items were inside. It is interesting how little some of the items are worth. One is a ferry ticket. What a small thing to hide with such effort. To craft something so perfectly designed to conceal something with so little meaning in most people’s daily lives speaks to how the mother wanted to ensure these things were not lost to history- or in this case, the Memory Police.
And finally R, who pushed so hard to unlock the memories in the narrator and to have her continue writing. R seems to be th
e one who understands what art and writing can be. He insists on saving as many books as he can when the novels disappear and insists that she continue with her manuscript even after the novels are gone. When she herself is disappearing, he tells her that “Each word you wrote will continue to exist as a memory, here in my heart, which will not disappear.” (270) And isn’t it true that every poem or book we read and every piece of art we look at stays with us in a way? It is hard for something to truly disappear when put to words or image and it makes me think a little more about why art in all forms is usually the first thing silenced when times are dark.