Yoko Ogawa’s Memory Police is a translated script by Stephan Snyder, this dystopian novel that takes place on this unknown and unnamed island. The residence of this island lives in a world where things are slowly disappearing. For example, at the beginning of the story roses are no longer a thing and the people on this island start to forget what roses are. They forget the word, they forget the physical object is, what it meant to them and if they had memories of roses ar all. Immediately we are thrown into the Fantastic and the reader must hit the ground running and accept that things are slipping away in this society. Where the book title comes in is how these memories are extracted. In order to forget something, all reminders must be taken away, that’s where the Memory Police come in. These people go through and destroy any versions of that object that might exist anywhere on this island.
There is a relief to this story when we find out that there are still a number of people on the island that, for some reason, still remember all of the objects that have gone missing and those people usually end up getting arrested and taken away by the Memory Police and no one is really sure why this is happening.
The main character that we are following in this book is an author who is in the mists of writing a new book and as you read, it turns out that her editor is someone who is wanted by the Memory Police. This wouldn’t be the first person in that our main character has a close connection to who’s been taken away. In order to make sure that she doesn’t lose her editor, she ends up hiding him away in a makeshift room.
There are a lot of why’s and how’s that the reader is seeking for answers, but it’s less about the environment but about how the people are reacting to what is occurring around them, it’s death, it’s apocalyptic, it makes the reader think about our own world and the stories we tell. We are meant to think in a broader sense.