On an island of indeterminate location, in a house long since emptied of family life, a novelist works on her latest manuscript, the story of a typist who has lost her voice and can only articulate her thoughts via the new skills imparted by her secretarial teacher. Our narrator’s parents, an ornithologist and a sculptor, have died, their material legacies expunged by the ruthless and sinister Memory Police, who roam the island enforcing a regimen of “disappearances”.
Life on the island is being systematically atomised and erased: one day photographs are removed from communal life, the next, rose petals, boats or calendars. Once they awake to a disappearance – heralded by a roughening of the air and a sense of something missing – the islanders are not merely beholden to destroy their own belongings, but have the very concept and all associated memories removed from their frame of reference. Why this is happening is unknown; the ideology of totalitarian control and cultural isolation is implied, rather than explicitly outlined, and its intersection with the supernatural strengthens the feeling of allegory. All we are given to understand is that life is being dismantled, and to have memories is inimical to the project.
This refined conceit is of a piece with Japanese writer Yōko Ogawa’s other work: novels, novellas and stories that frequently separate their protagonists from the rest of the world and from a sense of their own history or context (The Housekeeper and the Professor, for example, centres on two characters who communicate through maths puzzles). A recurrent preoccupation is one of complicity and collusion; throughout The Memory Police, our narrator insists on the community’s strange acceptance of what is being visited upon them. “But what can we do?” she asks. “It’s disturbing to see things that have disappeared, like tossing something hard and thorny into a peaceful pond. It sets up ripples, stirs up a whirlpool below, throws up mud from the bottom. So we have no choice, really, but to burn them or bury them or send them floating down the river, anything to push them as far away as possible.”
As the novel progresses, the narrator’s daily routines are buffeted by external events that force her into more directly confronting her lack of liberty. Her editor, with whom she has an affinity that seems to underpin her ability to write, reveals that he is in danger: he is one of the few citizens who is unable to forget what has been taken away, and therefore subject to summary justice and reprisal. In league with an elderly friend of the family, the narrator sets about constructing a hiding place in her own home, an elaborate room within a room in which her editor must immure himself in order to evade capture.
Ogawa exploits the psychological complexity of this bizarre situation to impressive effect, overlaying its natural tension with sexual ambiguity and a sense that the lines between safety and captivity are being blurred. Interspersed with the narrator’s account of the difficulties of keeping her clandestine housemate hidden, fed, watered and entertained are excerpts from her own novel, which appears to be swinging wildly into a terrifying story of Bluebeard-style abduction: “I had imagined that the two of them, bound by a warmer and more ordinary affection, would wander off to search for her voice at a typewriter factory or in a lighthouse at the end of a cape or in a morgue or in the storage room of a stationer’s, but somehow things had ended up like this.”
A work of fiction that sets itself such stringent boundaries and problems of internal logic (if the inhabitants of the island have their concepts of items entirely wiped from their sensibilities, how are they able to name them? How does a milliner know what he once was when hats have disappeared?) must eventually reach a reckoning. Ogawa brings hers about in a deeply unsettling fashion, plunging her imaginary world into entropy and post-apocalyptic decay. There are obviously parallels between the society she describes and those similarly intolerant of collective memory and will, but her achievement is to weave in a far more personal sense of the destruction and distortion of the psyche.
• The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder, is published by Harvill Secker (£11.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
