Varieties of the Fantastic in Fiction

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa has a slower build-up to the horrors of the fantastic. While the story starts by throwing us into the fantastic circumstances of this reality, it slows down the events as they are told. In short stories, readers get to speed through a story and not get all the necessary details. However, an article of the fantastic that is extremely important is that no one has a name. This entire book is about loss and censorship of knowledge. No one is given a name. Not the narrator, the editor, or the old man. The narrator is a writer; writing is all about the identity of characters and events. Names are also about identity. Losing your name strips away a part of you, not just in a figurative sense, but in a literal one. If one is introducing themselves, yet not allowed to say their name, how is one to explain who they are? So much of one’s identity is attached to a name. Even concepts without a name hold no meaning. “On the other hand, one of the perks of the job was that I received gifts of food from some of our clients, like sausage and cheese and corned beef, which had long since vanished from the markets and were an enormous treat for the old man, R, and me.” (pg. 164) The control over the lost items — books, perfume, birds — is what the narrator wants. Censorship is dangerous in both forms in this book. Censorship shows through the text. The fiction bleeds into reality. Where the government censors what we know, the difference is what is forgotten from the story ceases to exist in their world. The Memory Police enforce the forgetting of items; they make sure that no one remembers things they aren’t supposed to.