Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police

Yoko Ogawa has said that the reason she became a writer was reading the diary of Anne Frank as a teenager. Writers tell ourselves—and other people—stories about where our writing comes from, historical accounts that seem to us at least partially true at the time. Maybe we grew up in a storytelling family, or one where it was not possible to say the important things aloud. And then a writer comes along who says what we didn’t know we could say or tells stories that resonate with the truths we wish we could read. Although, after all my years of writing and teaching writing, it also seems to me that the urge to say what happened, to make sense of it or alter it, starts so early that we can’t find the beginnings. Maybe, then, we were already writers but we wake up to our awareness of this when we come across a writer whose particular urgent project touches us profoundly. 

Ogawa has set The Memory Police (translated by Stephen Snyder) on an island where objects and memories are disappearing, and the Memory Police round up those who fail to conceal their memories of how life used to be. The narrator/protagonist of the book, a writer, hides her editor, R, in her house in an old store room that can only be reached from the office above. His wife has begged the narrator to protect him, and they keep this plan a secret from R until the narrator has rebuilt the room with the help of her friend, “the old man.” In the novel she’s writing, another narrator/protagonist’s mysterious, cruel, beloved former teacher is eradicating her. In the “real” world of The Memory Police, it’s the outside world disappearing—roses, birds, novels, people, memories.  

The writer is losing her memories, R is not, and in this poignant novel, their conversations are one way of exploring what it means to lose the past, as well as a kind of abandonment to—and also protection from—their sometimes awkward closeness. She talks with great frankness to her editor over the course of the book: 

“I sometimes wonder what I'd see if I could hold your heart in my hands," I told him. "I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn't quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I'd need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn't slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It's usually hidden deep inside, so it's much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember, there in my hands. Doesn't that sound marvelous?” 

“Would you really like to remember all the things you’ve lost?” R asked. 

I told him the truth. “I don’t know. Because I don’t even know what it is I should be remembering. What’s gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That’s why I’m jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles.” 

In the middle of this nightmare, this passage, with its visceral humanity, centers on the heart as both metaphor and the most necessary part of the body. The narrator is loving and tender towards the heart, but the image of removing it is inherently violent. R, though, responds with affection and curiosity, which opens the way for her to admit to her jealousy of his heart, “one that offers some resistance.” She’s hiding him; he’s helping her hang onto some sense of the world in her writing, which has become increasingly difficult the more she forgets. 

Ogawa has said that after encountering Anne Frank, she went on to read Japanese writers, to be inspired by Kenzaburō Ōe and Haruki Murakami. Though she doesn’t sound quite like anyone else, their lineage shows in her mixture of emotional honesty and inventiveness. (She’s also named Paul Auster as a deep influence.) In an interview for Nippon.com, she talked about the experience of having The Memory Police, a 1994 novel, translated in 2019: 

They were asking me political questions that nobody did 25 years ago. I had no intention of depicting a near-future setting as a political statement—it was meant to be more like the past, before I was born. But when I reread the book for the first time in ages, I was shocked that I’d included a tsunami, and it’s frightening to think that rather than getting further away from the world I created in the book, contemporary readers are connecting it with the near future.” 

Living with the loss of memory is an ongoing preoccupation for Ogawa. Back in the early days of The Marvelous Paragraph Project, Ron, my spouse, wrote this in their essay about Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor:  

The titular professor of Yoko Ogawa’s wonderful novel The Housekeeper and the Professor is the kind of math teacher one would most hope for—gentle and affirming rather than scolding, delighted to share the wonder of numbers and the orderly way they encompass the universe. The narrator, an unnamed housekeeper hired to clean the professor’s house, learns that he has only 80 minutes of short-term memory, the result of a car accident 17 years ago. Although he clips notes to his suit jacket to remind him of what he cannot remember, she must reintroduce herself to him every day, whereupon he always asks her shoe size or telephone number and then notes some numerical significance it possesses. They develop a rapport as his enthusiasm for whole math catches her imagination, and he bonds with her 10-year-old son, whom he affectionately nicknames “Root” after the flat top of the boy’s head—reminiscent, he says, of the square root sign.   

Ogawa’s obsession with all kinds of loss, including the memory of what we have lost, feels very resonant right now, as we try to figure out how to live in a time when we don’t know what will be disappearing next, or at least what they will try to take away. I’ve been thinking for a couple of months about whether or not to write to you about this beautiful, sad book. It’s for those comforted by a fantastical book that still cuts down to the bone. One of the things storytelling can do so beautifully is to give a name to our dreads and painful experiences, to shape them and turn them to metaphor. Truth feels comforting amid all the lies and the accompanying bullshit about the lies (“It’s the teacher’s fault for having assigned homework too irresistible to dogs. Or it would be the teacher’s fault if the dog had eaten it. But of course it never happened.”) 

Our minds need art and story to help us stay alive and not go numb. Sometimes I want escape right now, and sometimes the truth, and sometimes to take action with all the other people boycotting and calling and writing and giving money, and whatever else seems like the potentially useful thing to do in that moment. (Plus I am eating a whole lot of noodles these days.) I was going to say—though it is perhaps not the most inspiring motto—survival is, in fact, sometimes sufficient. But, truly, survival is insufficient. Even in the face of the reckless destruction, the self righteousness of vengeance or even glee. What Doris Lessing called “the joy in malice.” So I’m celebrating whatever anyone is doing, in whatever realms, on behalf of life, literature, compassion, and the celebration of human inventiveness (appreciating Waging Nonviolence reminding us of how much resistance is actually happening).

Meanwhile, we still have our memories of what we want to restore, our vision of what the future can still be. I appreciate Yoko Ogawa and how she brings beauty into the hard places.

Writing and Teaching

In addition to political life and a lot of medical events among my friends and family, things going on around here include having just finished teaching a beautiful group of novelists in my winter class, as well as a couple of big projects of editing people’s books. My next open class is in summer, so there’s some nonfiction and flash fiction happening right now. I’m still not as good about submitting or pitching things as I ought to be. Everything else seems to be a higher priority. Watch this space, and if you see any notes about my work coming out, then I did better. I’m also watching White Lotus and The Residence, because somehow bad behavior on the screen is a wonderful escape from bad behavior in real life. 

MPP Contributor News 

Marcy Dermansky, who wrote about Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here in relation to her own Hurricane Girl, has a marvelous new novel, Hot Air. A struggling writer, a single mother, is on a first date that’s not going well (although her daughter is happily playing downstairs with her date’s son, and there’s a gorgeous pool, as so often in Marcy’s books). Then a tech billionaire and his wife, out on an anniversary hot air balloon ride gone very wrong, crash into that pool, screaming at each other. The novel’s hilarious and touching and so smart about all the ways people use their power and privilege. Also very addictive. Marcy’s just published a new essay in Lit Hub called “The First Step in the Writing Process: Be Kind to Yourself,” and I recommend that too. 

Stuff that’s been inspiring me lately 

You never know what you’ll get from literary events. The whole idea can seem so simple: someone is standing at a podium, reading the thing they wrote. Or sitting behind a camera. Or talking with a stranger or a friend. Or occasionally putting on a multi-media performance.  

Some of them can be less than thrilling, mostly when the writer clearly isn’t enjoying themselves. I have sympathy for that—I remember giving one reading where one of the organizers kept trying to photograph me from below (nothing good will come of that) and then looking down at his camera, shaking his head regretfully, and trying again. I literally started to lose my place and stammer at a certain point.  

But when literary events are great, they’re like getting a, I don’t know, blood transfusion. The California Book Club’s monthly online events are a sure bet—John Freeman is an amazing interviewer, and this month’s conversation with Rita Bullwinkel and Lucy Corin was brilliant. I loved Headshot and was happy to learn more about it. Also, I’m a Lucy Corin fan. Fun, inspiring, full of ideas to think over. Here’s the recording. 

And there was a wonderful online launch reading for a group of the new Four Way Books spring releases, hosted by Norwich Bookstore in Vermont: Aaron Coleman (Red Wilderness), Susan Browne (Monster Mash), Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (After the Operation), Patrick Donnelly (Willow Hammer), Daniel Ruiz (Reality Checkmate), and Allegra Solomon (There's Nothing Left for You Here). The reading hasn’t (yet?) shown up online, but you can find these books, and others from this and prior seasons, here, including C. Dale Young’s beautiful new Building the Perfect Animal. All wonderful writers, and the reading itself felt intimate, intense, precise, full of surprises, and contained. I admire that combination of total passion and the ability to know when your ten minutes is up. Actually, that seems key in so many ways.  

Wishing you some beauty and inspiration this month, along with courage and aliveness and the ability to hold onto the moments of joy. I always love hearing from writers and readers, and if you feel so moved, would be happy to hear how you’re doing right now.