![]() Her narrator doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain what she is losing. She cares more about the effects on the populace. The reader may be curious about the process, or indeed, the rationale behind this chipping away of memories that feature in the book’s summary. Every once in a while, a fragment of memory will return to her, but despite R’s urging, she cannot summon it all back. There is an understated love affair here, but it’s more than that: although our narrator cannot remember the deleted memories, she does feel the loss somewhere inside her, and sheltering R is a way of vicariously compensating. Unwilling to let his life be destroyed like that of the others, the narrator builds a hiding place for him in her home and secrets him there. Things go from bad to worse when the narrator’s editor, R, is revealed to be one of the aberrations - he too is able to remember the removed items and memories. The deletions continue: ribbons disappear one day, then roses… Life goes on, with a few new daily struggles added every time “it” happens again. Communications with the outside world, along with transport to the mainland, have been removed a long time ago. This is where the titular Memory Police come in, apprehending the aberrations and taking them away to some unknown place. But sometimes, a few people - such as the narrator’s mother - remain unaffected by the memory removal operation, leaving them as fugitives of a sort. The islanders then dutifully destroy the remaining objects, burning them or throwing them into the sea. The objects themselves still exist, but all the feelings associated with them are gone. There’s no real pattern or reason, and the thing could be anything from birds to boats. Her crime would be trivial in our world: collecting souvenirs of small items such as candies and perfumes.īut this island has a peculiar feature - every now and then, certain things are deleted from the islanders’ memories. Her mind wanders back to her mother, a sculptor, who was arrested and made to ‘disappear’. ![]() On an unnamed island, the narrator, a young woman novelist, struggles to write her newest novel. What does it mean, when something is precious to us? Is it the object itself, or our memories and feelings about it? In her book, The Memory Police (first written in 1994, and newly translated to English by Stephen Snyder), Yoko Ogawa grapples with the duality of memory and loss.
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