The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa | BOOK REVIEW

I review and discuss The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. A speculative science fiction novel about things "disappearing."
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#booktube #sciencefictionnovel #reading

[hazmatzuki]

I just finished reading the book and I took a long look around me at all the things that are part of our everyday life that sometimes seem useless. After all, even if most of them disappeared and lost even the meaning of those things, as appears in Police Memory, life would go on, we could live without those things. But how much we would lose and how our heart would slowly break apart! The one I liked the most was the metaphor of the loss of voice, which appears in the short story within the short story, which is linked to the oppression of totalitarian regimes and which leads to the annihilation of freedom of expression and thought. I have also perceived the installation of this regime, exactly like the installation of Alzheimer's which slowly erases your memories and pieces of your life. The parallel between the two isolations, the one in the tower (in the written part) and the one in the editor's secret room, is also beautiful. Both make you think of an incarceration and the balance of power between the one who is imprisoned and the one he supervises.I come from a former communist country, with a very harsh regime in which I only got to live for 10 years, but enough to remember all the queues and the lack of basic food, the regime of terror and intimidation to which the entire population was subjected. I felt this atmosphere so well described in the book, that I was surprised that a Japanese writer could describe such accurate. Another very well captured aspect is resistance through art, culture. All hidden objects in artwork. In communist Romania, the only way to keep your mind and soul intact was art and literature. Everyone read, even those with little education. Police Memory is one of the most beautiful and sensitive dystopian books I have read and I recommend it. Your presentation is very good, thank you!

[MrGorobu]

The message is about gratitude and letting go. Those who can't let go are essentially living in the past, wasting away and hunted by time, The Memory Police. Everything, in time, is lost to time. And time is uttetly indifferent to your loss. Hence, the police so inconsiderate. Not taking off their boots, which is a huge deal in Japan. Holding up the train etc. Just my 2 yen.

Side note, I think Murakami's work is drenched in meaning. Kafka by the shore and A wind up bird chronicle are so difficult to put down.

[Sybilla]

I love your review of The Memory Police. It was one of those books that touched me in such a deep way. Having lost my mother, father, brother and husband, it made me think a lot about how our focus on memory is important to retaining much of the things and people we've known in life. Without that focus many of our memories seem to slowly disappear or at least become dream like, less accessible. I've also read most of Murakami's work and his books also have passages that are deep and meaningful but often get lost through some disconnection in writing. Maybe it's the translation element as you noted. Thanks again for the great review.

[zihanyu]

Love the review! Especially the part about the translations. I didn't feel that common lacking of translated books with this one and the translations made the book even more tender.

[valvihk]

This book reminded me so much of WW2, historical book burning, Alzheimer's disease, et cetera.

[matthewmusgrave]

Uh oh, I didn't know it was frowned upon to have a main character be a writer or a record keeper. I'm writing a story where the first three chapters is the main character writing his memoir for his young children to read when they are older. As for the book you reviewed, it's always cool to see a foreign book be translated for English readers, and the plot sounds very intriguing.

[dylanwolf]

I was absolutely haunted by the book. It seemed to me such an insightful and beautifully delicate description (the word I really want to use here doesn't exist; describe - description, but relate - relation? what is the unclunky version of "telling"?) of what it is to experience existence, that is, to live.

We perceive the world through qualia, which carry a power of evocation (through which they purvey a meaning to us which we build internally from our previous experiences of qualia), but also are also irreparably transient (memories, as we know, are transformed, corrupted if you like, by their recollection - they only bear an untransmutable form once passing into oblivion).

To take the book as a dystopia of totalitarianism or a warning against the increasing ubiquity of surveillance in modern society I feel is to drastically undersell it. I don't think The Memory Police is at all a political novel.

[konstantinlevin]

Good look at the novel. Much appreciated.

[Paromita_M]

I read this book as one of my first reads of 2024 and was blown away. What a quiet, poignant, thought-provoking read.

Great review.
I really liked Never Let Me Go too though I think I like Klara a bit more.