The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is just sad. The evil dystopian memory police make people forget concepts under the guise of forgetting stuff. People accept it because forgetting stuff like music boxes and novels wouldn’t make you forget music or imagination.
Except it totally does and people move on without whatever it was that they forgot about. Because what are they going to do? Remember? Pshaw.
One day all the roses are gone. The response is, “Welp, roses were nice. Guess I’ll forget about them now.”
The protagonist’s father was an ornithologist. When it’s time to forget birds, she’s just relieved her father didn’t live to live without them. Then she forgets about birds. The memory police confiscate her father’s relevant documents including a beloved family photo.
Later, a forgetting-resistant character brings up photography and she doesn’t remember what that is.
How are things selected for forgetting?
How does mass forgetting get enforced?
It’s not much of a question that’s asked by characters. In the world of the novel, the question is what’s wrong with the few (?) people who remember. For me, and I’m guessing other readers, the question is what’s wrong with everyone else.
Eventually, people forget enough of their body parts that they just wither. The body parts are still there, people just ignore them and die.
There is a small bit of hope. The novelist-protagonist had been sheltering her forgetting-resistant editor from the memory police. Once she forgets how to be a person he leaves. The hope is that maybe he isn’t immediately taken by the memory police. Maybe he even gets out of their scope. Or, if not the editor, then maybe someone else.
For the story, it doesn’t really matter.
Right now, I see that the book is about how people will be boiled alive if you turn up the heat slow enough. The “surely they will stop at this” or “they won’t be extreme enough to do that” are things characters say a lot as the memory police don’t stop and get more extreme. It’s easy to read it as a straightforward fascism warning.
But what I find so intriguing about the novel is how many other things it could be about.
Maybe in other times and for other people the novel is something else. Maybe it can be something about loss and grief; your loved ones aren’t gone as long as you remember them. Or, cherish the little things because a small piece of candy or a thriller can bring you joy.
Whatever it means, that sure was melancholy.