Yoko Owaga’s “The Memory Police” paints an unsettling picture of what happens when power falls into the wrong hands. It is a story within a story set on a strange island where memories fade faster than the tides change.
Originally published in 1994 and written in Japanese, this story was re-published and translated into English in 2019. Owaga gives readers a timeless precautionary tale as the plot maintains relevance today despite being published in the 90s. Taking inspiration from reading Anne Frank’s diary, Owaga tells two cautionary tales in one novel.
The story revolves around three main characters who never receive official names. Instead, the reader follows along through the main perspective of a writer telling her story, a beloved old man and the writer’s editor called R. It’s impressive just how emotionally invested Owaga can make the reader become to these nameless characters, only giving glimpses into their backgrounds, almost as if to create the illusion we are missing memories around them ourselves.
The nameless nature goes past the three main characters of this story, as she describes fellow townspeople by their occupation, the hat maker, the butcher and so forth, showing how stripping the people of their memories influences the way they think and creating identity not from names and personalities but instead labels and jobs.
The main protagonist being a novelist spends much of the first half of the novel writing a story eerily similar to her ongoing, real-life scenarios. However, she doesn’t realize where the story she’s writing is going or even where the inspiration to write it came from. Imagine if your past was just as fleeting as the uncertainty of your future. If one day you could remember you loved roses, but had no clue what a rose smelled like, let alone looked like, until it’s no longer in your memories at all.
The only thing that is clear is that the Memory Police are on high alert for anyone on the island who isn’t losing the memories that are being banned. Items such as candy, perfume, calendars, ferries, photographs, emeralds, flowers, hats, and birds all end up on the banned list for this peculiar island. This causes people with careers around any of these objects to restart their lives and deal with what’s described as a void within themselves around a passion they no longer remember. Though the ones who forget easily are not the issue, it’s the ones who don’t that the Memory Police take away never to be seen again.
Owaga takes a lot of inspiration from the hardships expressed in Anne Frank’s diary to recreate the experience of a person hiding in far too small a space simply for not fitting into the government’s established and preferred type of human. Her writing can be challenging at first to get into as it is a transcribed text but once you adjust to the format of the writing, the story really begins to take shape and one will find themselves feeling overcome with worry for these nameless characters.
A fast read at just 288 pages, it is perfect for anyone interested in dystopian fiction that falls right in line with books like “The Giver,” or “Divergent.” An unusually told story, it weaves in chapters of the novel being created by the protagonist between chapters of the story already being told. Be prepared to be left with plenty to contemplate around this novel’s not so subtle social commentary. It’s a great choice for anyone in a book club or with a pal who’s ready to dive into all the hidden meanings tucked away in this novel.