Japanese Literature discussion
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The Memory Police
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10/2019 The Memory Police, by Yōko Ogawa
*crickets*I’m not sure I’ve heard such a loud silence in this group for a monthly book discussion. Hoping it’s temporary :)
I started MP today and am on page 48. I’m astounded that this novel hasn’t been translated into English until now. I’m enjoying Ogawa’s sentences and the world she’s created immensely. I’m glad she doesn’t explain everything to the reader but reveals the experience of disappearance an event at a time.
Anyone else reading it?
Carol wrote: "*crickets*I’m not sure I’ve heard such a loud silence in this group for a monthly book discussion. Hoping it’s temporary :)
I started MP today and am on page 48. I’m astounded that this novel ha..."
It has been quiet, Carol! I'm half way through now. I'm hoping to finish it in the next few days. I feel pretty much like you - hard to believe it's taken 25 years to get an English translation. And all the more remarkable that it feels so *now* - it's actually quite unsettling to read, the parallels to 2019 and the state of the world are uncanny.
I'm being blown away by the book's quiet devastation. She does write brilliantly, and the translation (as far as I can judge) really does do her justice. Each chapter feels like its own little 'moment', and generally ends with a wistful, mournful, but moving short sentence.
I'm at the point where the snow has been falling (that's not really a spoiler). And I'm thoroughly enjoying the enigma, the unexplained, the questions that remain unanswered. Can't wait to see how it develops (although I have a few guesses in my head as to how it will go)...
I’m down in London for a Japanese rock concert this weekend, so thought what better way to celebrate than start this! I also have a hefty migraine so I’ve only managed 40 pages so far. I’m enjoying it though, it’s good to have more Ogawa back, I love her style.
So I picked it up again this morning, and apart from stopping to make some lunch, I pretty much postponed everything else I had planned for today so I could finish this. It has left me with *so* many questions! But also with a sense of having experienced something quite wonderful. I can't wait for the comments to come in, and discussion to get going, as others come to this. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did!
One passage near the end seemed, to me, to strike at the very essence of how we are perhaps meant to take the book. The narrator and R are discussing her novel, and R says:
'The meaning isn't important. What matters is the story hidden deep in the words. You're at the point now where you're trying to extract that story. Your soul is trying to bring back the things it lost in the disappearances.'
Jeshika wrote: "I’m down in London for a Japanese rock concert this weekend, so thought what better way to celebrate than start this! I also have a hefty migraine so I’ve only managed 40 pages so far. I’m enjoying..."I hope your migraine has gone away.
I haven't gotten any further, but thought I'd share this Japan Times review.https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/...
It flags one of the things that appeals to me about Ogawa's stories - that her characters are always stuck/trapped in some manner, and they find ways to live as much as they can within that limitation. In this novel (for as much as I've read), and in the other 3 I've read of hers, her characters generally accept those limitations, or at least they don't express on the page angst, frustration, or self-pity at the way things are, in terms of external limits. The idea that she started with an impression borne from Anne Frank's diary is interesting.
I am quite enjoying the prose, and I hope we get some explanation of what's going on later in the novel. Without some explanation I expect I'll feel cheated. But I've just barely started and there's plenty of time.I wonder at how this small island (apparently independently of anywhere else) can support such professions as ornithologist and novelist. It's a conceit often found and not justified in such novels of isolation. Kirino's The Goddess Chronicle, for one, avoids that conceit, but it's rare.
That said, I'll go back to my usual quixotic pedantry :)
The usage "was disappeared" still grates on me. I know it's been in use since at least Pinochet's coup in Chile, but still...
Using an intransitive verb passively makes it doubly-passive, as if no one at all is responsible. But of course someone is. Pinochet's regime removed/eliminated/eradicated thousands of people, and deserves a stronger condemnation than "were disappeared".
So I'll read this novel as "were removed" or "were taken away" rather than "were disappeared", unless someone can point me to an exactitude of language in the original :)
Bill, as ever I applaud your 'quixotic pedantry'. Re. the island, later on the narrator visits her mother's cabin in the mountains, and has to get a train, followed by a hour's walk, so I would say it's a decent size, probably able to justify businesses, institutions, etc.
Bill wrote: "I am quite enjoying the prose, and I hope we get some explanation of what's going on later in the novel. Without some explanation I expect I'll feel cheated. But I've just barely started and there'..."I wonder whether this novel in Japanese uses disappeared? I accepted its use here because Ogawa, but I understand your raised eyebrow completely. lol
Funny, you wondered how their original careers were possible on this island; I was struck by the stories of citizens whose careers were rendered obsolete and who simply took up something else, as if the labor market supported random shifts into other industries when groups of jobs became expendable.
I'm similarly intrigued as to the original Japanese. 'Was disappeared', to me at least, obviously and deliberately suggests a third-party action, rather than just an occurrence, so it immediately conveys the impression of an outside force being responsible.
I will start today , reading a the french translation Cristallisation Secrète
, for two reasons : wake my rusty french up, and ... it was half the price with still a nice cover. Although I wanted the english cover... snif. But I am trying to spend a more reasonable amount of money on books. From your comments I wonder if this is going to resonate
The Buried Giant by Ishiguro. Same theme of memories drifting away. I loved that read, although it was startling and many people hated it too.
Alan wrote: "I'm similarly intrigued as to the original Japanese. 'Was disappeared', to me at least, obviously and deliberately suggests a third-party action, rather than just an occurrence, so it immediately c..."Shades of South America in the 1970s? Here’s a History Channel article on Argentina and being disappeared. This use is intentional, IMO.
https://www.history.com/news/mothers-...
I’m just past page 100 now. (view spoiler)
Alan wrote: "I'm similarly intrigued as to the original Japanese. 'Was disappeared', to me at least, obviously and deliberately suggests a third-party action, rather than just an occurrence, so it immediately c..."I also find “was disappeared” or “were disappeared” grating and weird. We say, “was eliminated” or “was missing” and don’t bat an eye. I am no grammar scholar, but this seems a cultural linguistic difference. I still can’t get used to “gone missing,” so commonplace now in culture and media; nobody “disappears” anymore. I’m certain this is a Briticism embraced by international journalists, having learned the language in countries where English is taught with a Brit slant.
Can anybody give me an example phrase wiht the "was disappeared" with the chapter ? then i can check how it was translated in french, but I suspect the translator went with "a disparu / ont disparus" , equivalent to "has/have disappeared" so without any grammatical weirdness. I am starting chapter 4 and nothing to report about this topi.c. Personally I do like a small gramatical weirdness to show that in the original language the verb was actually allowing for a direct object, so I woudl be ok with the "was disappeared"
it reminds me about "spirited away" , translation for the "Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi" anime by Miyasaki. Also there it was comented that the translator felt a need for a verb that would allow for an object...
It's in the first sentence of chapter one :)
I just finished the 'typewriter room' scene, which I think was beautifully done. I wonder where the story-within-a-story can go from there.It reminds me about the odd fascination Japan has with fictional student-teacher relationships. It's not all about older men lusting after girls. Most of time when I see it, it's written as romance stories for school girls.
Bill wrote: "It's in the first sentence of chapter one :)"confirmed that in french translation they go with "what has disappeared ".
(slightly disappointed in french translator now. )
Bill wrote: "I just finished the 'typewriter room' scene, which I think was beautifully done. I wonder where the story-within-a-story can go from there.It reminds me about the odd fascination Japan has with f..."
That was one of the most breathtakingly awful scenes I’ve read. I wondered about the teacher-student theme in Japanese Lit, generally,and wondered whether I was missing a cultural reference.
Is it late enough in the month to discuss the whole book, including spoilers? I have several questions I'd like your thoughts on ... after finishing a couple of days ago.
I put it down for a few days after the 'typewriter room'. I'll pick it up again soon. So I'm still less than half done.
Carol, I'm all set for full-on discussion and questions, but I'm happy to wait a wee while longer for others to catch up if needs be.
Bill wrote: "I put it down for a few days after the 'typewriter room'. I'll pick it up again soon. So I'm still less than half done."Bill - do you want us to wait a week, perhaps, to discuss or are you just not that into it and we'll proceed now? I don't want you to feel pushed.
I finished it just now. Ouch.
Jeshika wrote: "I finished it just now. Ouch."Yeah. So she surprised me entirely in terms of how things would play out.
I'll try to finish it tomorrow. I have no plans for the holiday.
I have read "The Memory Police" today and I am rather unimpressed with it. I will take a peek in here every now and then without writing much to not kill the enthusiasm.
Aleksandra wrote: "I have read "The Memory Police" today and I am rather unimpressed with it. I will take a peek in here every now and then without writing much to not kill the enthusiasm."Oh, but I'd definitely like to hear your thoughts on why you weren't impressed! I think that's always the fun part of the discussion. :)
It had to be said...There were too many things missing at the end.
Overall, not my kind of novel. Too abstract, too symbolic of something not stated.
(view spoiler)
I loved it. I also have several questions and comments I'd love others to weigh in on and help me think through various interpretations:1. What is the significance of the story within the story?
The woman with the typewriter gains the skill of typing, but as soon as she gains it, she loses her voice, and appears to be the last of many victims given the pile of typewriters. It's not even enough to take her voice; he takes away her autonomy, locking her in the upstairs room, then eventually losing interest in her entirely. The typing instructor has done this time and time again to students. Why? And what's with the student coming up to the door, sensing the victim's presence, but leaving without reporting it? Finally, why does our narrator tell this story (as opposed to any other)? Why does Ogawa include it, e.g., how does it relate to or enrich the novel, other than teeing up the part of the story where the narrator has lost her ability to write or recall her own unfinished work?
In another group, a reader suggested that the story within a story is the "real" story of our narrator. "Maybe the book is actually about a woman being held captive and repeatedly raped, and the "outer" story is what she's making up in a (vain) effort to try and stay sane." Another reader responded, "Which would explain some inconsistencies with her remembering fruit and birds as well as the dog being affected. I think she made up the story of things being disappeared and the life she had as a way to cope or a survival mechanism from being held prisoner, raped, tortured. When the story of the typist was too close to her reality, novels suddenly disappeared. That can’t be coincidence."
This is a leap too far for me, but it explains Ogawa's including it and I haven't thought of another better explanation. Thoughts?
2. Some things physically disappear. (calendars, roses, emeralds, boats). Other things remain, but individuals lose their ability to remember anything about those items or their connection to the past or present. (novels, writing, one's left leg). She did say that things starting disappearing for many years before the Memory Police came into existence. I struggled to make sense of the extent to which things disappeared from people's consciousness, e.g., they couldn't perceive them, vs. they physically were gone from the environment. When I got to the conclusion with the legs, that ambiguity made it difficult for me to picture what was happening, although the way she told that story (of our narrator waking up and not recognizing her leg as.... her leg) and ended MP was brilliant. Is there a system for putting some disappearances in one bucket and others in another, or should I just let this go and accept it as-is?
3. Names. R and Don and the Inuis, the family that are first hidden and then carted off by the Memory Police have names or at least a surname. The narrator, her mom, the old man, the hat maker.... no one else does. Why do names matter? Of all of the characters, why does Ogawa give Don a name? He could easily have been "the dog" throughout, but he isn't. I would have thought that R's son might have a name, if the distinction is one of innocence.
4. So, based on her comments to Japan Times, Ogawa started with thinking about Anne Frank. But R and Don, whom I worried about being discovered or harmed from almost the first page, are free at the end, albeit trapped for the moment on an island where disembodied voices wander around without the ability to feed themselves, earn a living, reproduce, live a life. And the narrator, about whom I rarely was concerned -- because other than her single visit to the memory police headquarters -- she seemed to be smart about not attracting attention - has lost everything, as have almost all of her neighbors. The parallels to German citizens going along with Nazi regulations as they proliferate and giving up voluntarily anything asked of them is easy to see. Is Ogawa making a statement, though, about Japanese culture? I'm reminded of Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone and the picture Perry painted of a society that tends not to question or challenge authority, whether the result is that a school board gets away with lying about why hundreds of children were told to stay in a low-lying area as the tsunami headed their way, or a company gets away with selling a product that harms purchasers, because being a plaintiff suing a manufacturer for product liability is not deemed appropriate behavior. Or is she just telling a story? I tend not to think of this novel or of Ogawa as particularly political, but as tweaking and challenging societal and cultural norms. What do you think?
5. This is my fourth Ogawa novel, and one of her first to be published in Japan. I see it as her strongest and most accessible novel, by a long shot, although I enjoyed Revenge, Hotel Iris, and the Housekeeper and the Professor. It's got a compelling narrator with whom the average reader can relate. It's a story about a community rather than being a story about one weird or unusual character. It's not "sweet" or quirky (Housekeeper). It's dystopian but not nearly as dark as Hotel Iris or Revenge, IMO. As far as I know, none of the translations of her novels were paid for by the Japanese government, so it's simply whether publishers thought the material would sell in the West. I'm puzzled.
Excellent questions, Carol!! I had a lot of the same responses. I'll have time on Saturday to draft my responses, but I look forward to seeing what others think as well.
Great questions for thought! I hope we get some varied responses!I'll start by commenting on (2), because I think it's the most 'factual':
I don't think anything literally disappears overnight. Let's look at your examples: calendars, roses, emeralds, boats. People have to burn calendars, and our narrator gets in trouble for forgetting one. The rose petals are all floating downstream one morning, and while it's not stated, I suspect the garden workers did so or the memory police forced them to. We know nothing about the disappearance of emeralds, except that her mother still had one. The boat continues to exist for half of the novel, even though boats vanished much earlier. The only thing that seems to physically vanish on its own is spring. Everything else people lose their ability to recognize and/or remember, and then destroy (or are forced to destroy).
(1). I think the story within a story begins with our narrator's worry (which she expresses fairly early on) that people themselves might disappear. The loss of voice is how she expresses this fear within her story, but then as she said, the story got away from her and went in the direction it felt like. Once she's locked in the typewriter room, it's clear she's just the next in a long line of victims and the end of the story within a story is obvious. So why does the story within a story have a villain, while the outer story does not? Does our narrator desperately want there to be someone to blame for the disappearances in the real world?
Bill wrote: "Great questions for thought! I hope we get some varied responses!I'll start by commenting on (2), because I think it's the most 'factual':
I don't think anything literally disappears overnight. L..."
oh, man. Now I have even more to think about. I really like your questions.
Jeshika wrote: "Aleksandra wrote: "I have read "The Memory Police" today and I am rather unimpressed with it. I will take a peek in here every now and then without writing much to not kill the enthusiasm."Oh, bu..."
yes, Aleksandra, do throw the mud :D !!!
I am only progressing slowly, I do love it but I feel like it is a read for which I need calm an quiet, which is not always available.
It is rather depressing of course.
for the moment, I think the objects that disappear are symbols for all loved ones or loved circumstances / places / faculties... .we all lose as time goes by and we grow old... and how we adjust and live with our limitations ... but I am only at chapter 7
I gave it 3 stars. I think I would’ve liked it more when I was younger. In my dotage I don’t want to work too hard to figure a story out. The word “disappears” is problematic. If “banned” was substituted, everything would make more sense. Flowers “disappear,” but they’re floating down a river. Calendars “disappear,” but they have to burn them. But using “banned” would make everything more obviously Nazi regime, Fahrenheit 451, or 1984.
The characters are aware that winter begins to “deepen” early in the novel, and they walk around, “shoulders hunched” and the Memory Police becomes “more brutal.” (p. 64) On p. 135 they wonder, “I wonder if spring will ever come.” and “spring never came.” (p. 136) All this dark, cold talk makes me think ...Westeros, Narnia? They need a savior, but it doesn’t happen. This mixed bag of a book is pretty much a downer for me.
It's been really interesting to see the split reaction to this one. I'm in the 'love it' camp. Given it's 25 years old it still felt very 'now' - timeless, I suppose you could say. And, for me, a lot of that comes from the deliberate elusiveness, the refusal to provide answers or explanations. I'm quite happy to have books stretch me like that, but I totally get others' frustrations!Given my overall feelings, I was happy enough to leave some oddities just as that. By the end, with our narrator disappearing into being just a voice, able to slip through the crack in the floor into R's room, I thought, well OK then. But then she sees her body on the floor, amongst other disappeared items. So I'm still not entirely sure what that all meant. Was everyone just becoming a floating consciousness? But even that was disappearing, as her voice was fading.
I kind of feel that Ogawa was somehow trying to explore how we create memories, and how memories work. If I remember something from a few years ago, say, then how was that memory triggered? And where did that memory reside in my brain until I remembered? And how important is that we *do* remember certain things. R makes much of the importance of writing, and that the narrator's words will remain, which is why it was so important for her to finish her novel. In the article Carol links to above, Ogawa does talk about how she focused on art's response to authoritarianism, and as a writer this would be her go-to response, I suppose.
So, that takes me onto the story within the story. I saw it as a mirror-image of the main story - as in, a reverse image. As the typist loses her voice, so all the narrator has by the end is her voice. By the end, the typist had also physically disappeared, or somehow morphed into her typewriter. So all the other typewriters in the room were, in fact, the 'remains' of previous victims? And the girl the teacher is bringing to the door is the next. Bill's point about there being an actual 'villain' seems pertinent. Given the absence of an explanation of who is governing the island, and as such the body that directs the Memory Police, I see the story as our narrator's way of trying to make sense of what's going on. We need our enemy to have a face, an identity, in order to confront it. But, in both stories, there is subjection, meek acquiescence to authority. OK, people hide others in the main story, but that's not really opposing, is it? In some ways, hiding those who retained memories was their way of somehow storing memories themselves - through R, the narrator is able to 'remember' things, or have them explained. So, is R really just the voice of Ogawa - her novel, about a novelist writing a novel, is her way of saying how important writers are?
On Carol's point about the names, does anyone have any insight into whether the actual names we get have any significance? Don doesn't feel a very Japanese name (!). Inui, if I search online, is translated as 'northwest'. For any Japanese speakers here, would that be a correct translation? And if so, is it just a name Ogawa picked or is there a hidden meaning I'm not getting? And why just R? Again, in the original Japanese how would one write that, and might it signify anything?Overall, I think the absence of names is a common trope of dystopian literature - well, in my limited reading of it! I think of McCarthy's The Road, or an excellent book published this year, Doggerland by Ben Smith. Both use 'the man' and 'the boy', without naming characters. I suppose the rationale is that they become metaphors for us to read into, which gives the story itself the thing we focus on. (Although saying that, I did feel that the characterisation in MP was quite well-drawn. I certainly got a sense of who the main characters were.)
What an interesting discussion! It seems to me now that it was worth reading the novel, if only to participate in a conversation with you. I will try to focus on the issues which have been mentioned before, so I am (at least for now) leaving out the problems of, e.g., inconsistent character development, which in my view make the novel fall apart.Names
My assumption was that the narrator used the names which best represented the characters for her, or perhaps how she thought about them when she was thinking about the events of the day. Following this logic, Don is the label in the narrator's head which the dog receives after she gets used to calling him by name in order to give commands. The Inuis have a collective name, because she perceives them as a collective. K only gets a letter, but using this this trope here is justified by the idea that the narrator is hiding the person hidden behind the one-letter name; this behavior may reasonably persist in her thinking about K. The old man is, well, just an old man, meaning that the narrator sees him thus. But perhaps this interpretation is too simple?
Story inside the story
Like Alan, I see the story inside the story as a mirror of sorts, albeit a purely esthetic one. The inside-novel refers to the outside-novel in a way that indicates how Ogawa sees the process of turning real-life events into a plot of a novel, given the censorship and other such limitations. I did enjoy the plot theory which Carol mentioned in (1), though. Someone really put a lot of effort into concocting it. Is there a way we could make this plot theory credible in the context of the novel?
Memories and forgetting / disappearing
This thread, quite independently from other problems, kills the novel for me. I do not expect a science-fiction-like attention to detail in the represented world. To me, the mystery behind the specifics of memory purge and disappearing can be a hint to reflect on how the communal memory and consciousness fluctuate without anyone being able to pinpoint where one thing disappears and another is introduced. That being said, memory purging and disappearances are central to the conceptual flow of the novel. The reader experiences them exclusively from the perspective of the narrator and so the first-person perception, or the phenomenology of these processes should be rich and evocative. Sadly, despite multiple attempts to describe what these processes feel like (as opposed to what they are which I think is not central), Ogawa failed to convey even the basic intuition behind these perceptions. Repetitively, phrases like "there was just a new cavity in our hearts" appear in the narrative and introduce... nothing. To a reader who does not know what it might mean or feel like to have a "cavity in the heart" in a way that relates to memory, a new cavity will not ring a bell. Many other aspects of the book I could accept as pure sketches and metaphors, but the phenomenology of the key idea is literally the one thing that should be solid, well-communicated. It pains me to see that the author did not put some more work into imagining these process and building them up in the imagery even though they are a central conceptual premises of the novel. It feels like someone tried to write a novel about X and failed, because describing X was too difficult and unnatural.
I suspect that this failure is simply a result of inexperience. For one because the novel is quite old, but also because there are in the narrative other elements which are carried out in a lazy and/or ignorant manner. Take dialogue and scene resolution. At least twice the dynamics of the conversation or action is concluded with the premise that it is getting dark and that the main character should hurry home because __. The __ can be just weather or it can be a threat in the form of the memory police. The narrator ends up doing the same thing multiple times for different reasons, which makes little sense considering that each time the decision is sudden and decisive, underlined by fear and anxiety. I would expect such anxiety to have a source which is uniform throughout the novel. To me it looks like a simple mistake, yet telling of the literary ability of the author at the time. It does not surprise then me that approaching a difficult topic of non-existent psychological processes proved too difficult...
Any thoughts?
Regarding names.My name dictionary lists Inui as either "dog-well" or "dry" (as in my throat is dry; I'm thirsty). I don't know that either name has any significance, and I don't know which is used in the original.
Referring to people by a title or occupation isn't uncommon in Japan, so 'the old man' and 'the hat maker' are both normal.
Giving a dog a western name is perfectly normal. Heck, I have friends who give their pets Japanese names :)
Referring to a character by a single roman letter has been around in modern Japanese literature for at least 100 years (but not more than 150 years, since they didn't have roman letters back then). But it seems odd to me to have one character referred to by a letter and others referred to by name.
To add a new thread, do you think there is any relationship between the concept of disappearance in MP and the johatsu phenomenon in Japan? (see, e. g., this book for reference)
Vanishing is a nice book, more for its photography than for its research, IMHO.Haven’t had a chance to read MP... not enough time.
Curlysloppy wrote: "I gave it 3 stars. I think I would’ve liked it more when I was younger. In my dotage I don’t want to work too hard to figure a story out. The word “disappears” is problematic. If “banned” was sub..."
I am feeling differently about this topic. For me, Banished does not work, because it is not so that the concepts are banished from outside, the people who are affected also really do not care about them anymore in their heart, and stop understanding them. In that sense, the object has not "disappeared", but what disappears is actually the importance it has for the person. And then they burn the objects, bringing reality in sync with their feelings.
I found that quite interesting. It makes me think of how something "exists" for you only if you care about it. Example giving :
If a person is obsessed with style, maybe she would lose sleep over the idea that she can not afford to buy this or that pair of exclusive shoes. On the other hand, another person couldn't care less about it and not understand how anybody can spend an enormous amount of money on a pair of shoes that are not even practical.
Or when you are in love , every single detail of a person's doing becomes interesting. Then when you fall out of love, sometimes you couldn't care less about the person anymore! I think the novel is a metaphore for this kind of evolutions of the heart, and how willingly we can't bring back a lost feeling. Try as we might.
I found it all rather depressing.
Carol wrote: "I wonder whether this novel in Japanese uses disappeared? I accepted its use here because Ogawa, but I understand your raised eyebrow completely. "I liked the use of disappeared because that is exactly what happens, from the point of view of the people of the island. Something (or rather the concept of something) vanishes during the night, and it is necessary for the people to figure out what it is that they have lost.
Carol wrote: "I loved it. I also have several questions and comments I'd love others to weigh in on and help me think through various interpretations:1. What is the significance of the story within the story? ..."
I loved the story too, and I also had some questions-- who were the Memory Police and where did they come from? Why were they immune to the disappearances (they had to be, or they couldn't have enforced the rules), and why was it OK for them to remember? Most importantly for me-- who decided what would disappear? I could understand some of the items-- the ferry/boats, novels, and other things that would make it easier to control a population once they were gone, but birds, fruit, and roses seem to be such pointless losses.
Although I loved this book, it was really hard to read. We all have things disappear from us too-- I can't really recall the sound of my Dad's voice anymore, or the intense clarity of the taste of garden vegetables and berries from when I was very young-- food in general just doesn't taste as good anymore as I get older. I know that I've lost lots of small memories over the years, and this book made me feel uncomfortably aware of that.I loved the way that the novel in the book was the mirror image of the larger story. One woman lost her voice, and the other was left as only a voice, but in the end both were absorbed.
I wasn't surprised to learn that Anne Frank was one of Ogawa's inspirations for the book-- the tactics of the Memory Police reminded me very strongly of Nazi Germany. The endless hours of waiting in line in shops for scant offerings of inferior food also reminded me of reports out of Russia around the time this book was originally written.
I really hope that more of Ogawa's books will be translated into English soon!
Mentioned in passing in Inventing Japan (our history read this month), Buruma highlights what he calls 'special thought police' (p. 55). Obviously my first thought was Ogawa. I wonder if she had them in mind or was a possible source for her. Here's a wiki link:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokub...
Alan wrote: "Mentioned in passing in Inventing Japan (our history read this month), Buruma highlights what he calls 'special thought police' (p. 55). Obviously my first thought was Ogawa. I wonder if she had th..."Wow. Shades of North Korea with the informants in every neighborhood. Arrested 59k, brought only 5k to trial and only got convictions in half of those cases. This article includes enough tantalizing and offputting links to occupy me for many an evening. Thanks, Alan.
The Memory Police came up in the oct/nov 2024 nominations but I see from this thread that the group had previously read it. I have not read it yet so would be happy for a buddy read.
I purposely have not read this thread to avoid spoilers.
Jack wrote: "The Memory Police came up in the oct/nov 2024 nominations but I see from this thread that the group had previously read it. I have not read it yet so would be happy for a buddy read.
I purposely..."
I think you would love it, Jack. Five years is eons in group read land.
Yes. five years is forever. Oddly, though, when I remembered we'd read it as a group, it didn't seem that long ago.
Japanese Literature
Books mentioned in this topic
Kempeitai: Japan's Dreaded Military Police (other topics)Japan's Gestapo: Murder, Mayhem and Torture in Wartime Asia (other topics)
Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone (other topics)
Hotel Iris (other topics)
Cristallisation secrète (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Yōko Ogawa (other topics)Stephen Snider (other topics)
Two GR groups (of which I'm aware), in addition to us, are reading The Memory Police this month and I couldn't be more delighted to see Ogawa get some attention from more than the usual Western readers.
Has anyone read it? Initial thoughts?