(Don't) Stop Me if You've Heard This Before: and Other Essays on Writing Fiction by Peter Turchi

Author:Peter Turchi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trinity University Press

THE UNNAMED NARRATOR OF Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is less assertive and less violent than Janina, but she is, in her way, every bit as disturbing. This narrator is no murderer; rather, she’s one of many victims of an authoritarian state on an unnamed and inescapable island. At the outset she tells us that for as long as she can remember things have disappeared, vanished. We’re encouraged to interpret this broadly: she recalls her (disappeared) mother telling her, “It won’t be long now … Something will disappear from your life.” We can’t help but agree. But on the narrator’s island, the things that disappear—that are essentially destroyed, erased, or eliminated—include ribbons, bells, perfume, birds and, eventually, roses, photographs, fruits, books, and body parts. By novel’s end, the narrator is reduced to a voice, and even that is fading.

While the narrator is certainly disturbed by these losses, and while she takes great risks to protect one friend and investigate the disappearance of another, ultimately she seems passive, helpless. She’s a writer, and over the course of the novel we read excerpts from her work in progress, the story of a typist who is seduced by her teacher, held captive in a tower, and rendered voiceless. That character, whom we associate with the narrator, says that while her captor has done “truly horrible things … I can’t help feeling a kind of gratitude.” One day, when she’s alone in the tower, another typing student, a young woman, knocks at the door, providing a chance to escape. But instead the character stays silent. “How can you explain this?” she thinks. “And even if she did help you, do you really believe you’d get back all the things you’ve lost?” That night, her captor says, “I knew that you were no longer capable of going back out into the world.” She realizes that she is being replaced by the other young woman, and that they are two in a long line; but instead of expressing anger, she says she’s disappointed: “Why doesn’t he realize that my voice, my body, my sensations, my emotions—everything exists only for him.” Soon after that final installment of the novel within a novel, our narrator tells us that she and “the citizens of the island had lost everything that had a form, and our voices alone drifted aimlessly.”

In contrast to Lolita and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, The Memory Police provokes us because of what the character suffers, and because of what she doesn’t do. Unlike Humbert Humbert and Janina, she doesn’t seem compelled to justify herself; she’s simply recounting what happened. We can read the book as a more abstracted and fantastic version of the effects of a totalitarian state than, say, Orwell’s 1984; we can read it as a story of psychological and sexual abuse leading to something like Stockholm syndrome; we can read it as an illustration of the dangers of forgetting the past and failing to act to prevent its

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