The Memory Police

This month’s selection, The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, in our Bright Leaf book club made for a pretty good discussion, but in the end we did not rate it very highly. Basically, it is a dystopian story in some authoritarian controlled state that has a memory police agency whose ongoing function is to erase memories--one by one--from the citizens. Also, they are busy looking for certain people who manage to be immune to their erasures. The three main characters are a young woman writer, an old man who is her close friend, and her editor--who only goes by the name R. The editor, they soon discover, is one who still retains memories, so she and the old man conspire to hide him à la Anne Frank in her home. In the end, the old man dies, and she and the editor try to keep the memories alive, but she has just about disappeared into nothingness.

It was an amusing, but also a bit eerie thought as I started the book The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. A few days ago, tree cutters that my neighbors had hired obviously jostled the main power lines coming into my house while they took down the trees. I didn’t make a connection at first when the upstairs heat stopped and hung on the “auxiliary” setting as I’ve had trouble with that system before.

However it was not long that I tried to pop some corn in the microwave. The control panel was lit, the timer counted down as the turntable turned and all looked normal. Well, with the exception that no corn was popping. It was going through the motions but no microwaves were being produced. Next I would find the hot water at the sink was only reaching a warm temperature. That was when I knew it was not just a furnace issue and I easily revisited a guess that the incoming electricity had been affected by the stress the tree cutting had put on the power line. I checked out some other appliances--the oven, the dryer, the attic fan--and found them useless. Apparently the units that were big electricity consumers were affected but not the lesser ones.

Now things in my home, in my daily life that I somewhat take for granted, yet have routine positive interaction with now sit useless. I am counting on the situation to be rectified very soon and I will not lose my memory of them. But in this interregnum, much like the changes brought about by the pandemic, I have the opportunity to think about alternative arrangements. Will I discover new ways to do things and decide some old ways might even be best forgotten? Will I re-purpose things? (I think of my dishwasher that I so rarely use. It's actually become more of a storage cabinet for dishes and glassware now).

But I digress. The book was called a work of “speculative fiction.” That was a new term for me but I assumed my book club mates would have heard of it. Still, as we did not seem to rate the book highly, I chose to define speculative fiction as science fiction for readers who aren’t big fans of science fiction. Unlike tales that take place in imaginary alien worlds, or even in this world but in the way far future enabling the writer to dream up ridiculous technologies, this story takes place in a somewhat recognizable here and now. The tale is, instead, eerie like a Twilight Zone creation.

The writing was easily readable but goofy, in that Japanese style we’ve seen before in Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

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