The Memory Police

 

The Memory Police  by Yoko Ogawa

On an island, the people are forgetting things, and it’s all the governments’ doing. On occasion, things vanish, and so does the memory of those things. Birds, Ribbon, Candy, Roses, Ferries, Harmonicas… The people wake up and those things are “vanished”. The main character, who is unnamed, accepts this fact of life, as does everyone else. There’s no known reason, and they know things vanish, but there’s not anything to be done about it. And on the occasion that someone DOES remember things that have been vanished, the memory police take them away. The memory police show up to houses, trash the place looking for items that should have been destroyed, and destroy anything they find. And if the person puts up a fight, they are taken away by the police. 

Some people, though, can’t forget. And the memory police are rounding them up…

There are whispers of safe houses, and protecting someone is as dangerous as being in hiding. The main character decides she needs to protect her friend, even as her memories are disappearing all the time.

 

This was a very interesting read, and a dystopian tale about totalitarian surveillance, and holding on to the things that matter to you. It was nice to have a story where the main character wasn’t the hero who was going to save the day and overthrow the government. She was an everyday woman, dealing with the issues that everyone was dealing with. 

 

This book was thought-provoking, with the “what if” being more important than the “why.” It starts out with random objects being vanished, as they have been for many years, but the vanished things get less concrete as the story unfolds. The reasoning isn’t made clear either. Some objects get vanished, and life goes on.

There was some Orwellian themes here, as well as some parallels to Nazi Germany with the safe houses and the risks people took to protect other people who were persecuted.

Overall, it was a story that made me think about the themes more than the story, and in this case, I enjoyed that aspect more than finding out how and why things were the way they were.