The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (Book Review)

Today I’d like to share a book review of The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa and what life lessons we can glean from this book published in 1994.

This was a fascinating read. Call it dystopian, call it magical realism, a setting a bit surreal...and unreal but nevertheless, the premise grips you. It also reminds you of Nazi Germany and indeed any other authoritarian state.

Imagine a world where the Memory Police take away your most treasured things that hold memories - what makes you, you, human away from you. When it's taken away, you cannot remember it. It's a distant feeling that something is amiss but you carry on without your memories.

This book reminds me of the Diary of Anne Frank. There's a similar feel where one of the characters is in a tiny room holding onto the memories where, in the outside world, the Memory Police are cracking down and rounding people up who refuse to let go of them.

I believe that this book is a school text for our English students here in Melbourne, so I can anticipate many discussions in the classroom around memory, authoritarianism, and how we can forget so easily.

I think this latter aspect "forgetting" especially with regard to history is the most frightening part of this book in all honesty. That's my life lesson from this book - indeed, I'm already seeing it in the society we are currently living and experiencing, but that's another story.

Over to you. Let me know what you think about this book.

(1) Have you read any other books by Yoko Ogawa?

(2) What do you think were the main themes of this book and in particular, what life lessons do you think the author is enabling us to see?

(3) What other books are in a similar genre/theme that can be read? (I'd like you to consider the book We by Zamyatin - of which I have a review of this as an alternative).

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[DefaultName-nttk]

I wanted to read this book as well but have never got to it. Now you gave me an excellent review and inspired me to 'remember' to pick up this wonderful novel. Thank you 😊.

[abdulxbro]

Have this book for my VCE exam, thanks for the review :)

[paisley]

I've had this book on my TBR pile for ages, think it's time I actually read it, lol.

[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.