The Memory Police

by Yōko Ogawa

One of the more unexpected parts of Spotify, Pandora, and their ilk is how completely the concept of nostalgia has been crushed out of songs. Things I heard a lot, that meant a lot during a specific time in my life, now they’re available whenever. Big jumbled playlists and algorithms tethered to nothing decide half of the music I hear. Eve 6 has been decoupled from my teenage years and recontextualized as “2020 Songs To Clean To.” I’ve heard Inside Out fifteen times this month. I can’t quite reach beyond those new experiences to bite into that wave of nostalgia that popped up when streaming was still a search-and-destroy novelty. 

When something is slippery, when you can’t quite hold it in your mind exactly the way you believe you ought to be able, that is how something burrows in. Weirdness holds you askance; interpolated meanings wrap your mind like so much fallen foliage covering the dead earth. To understand something completely—or believe that you can—leaves nothing to puzzle over. Why pick at it, hours after the words are away from your eyes, if you’ve already gotten the whole truth? Will listening to the Garden State soundtrack transport you to the first time you ever went alone to see a movie in the theater, or has that been excised from the songs because they’re easy backbeats to fill alt-indie soft-vibe playlists?

I did not particularly like reading The Memory Police. I had to push my way through. I’m glad I did it. To be honest, I would not have finished it in time for its library due date, except the CV-19 pandemic shut the library down. Shut everything down, here on the West Coast of the US. I still have the book in my apartment, eight weeks later. Due back in August, and that’s optimistic. The entirety of the world is wrapped in fog now. Even in the short eternity that was two months ago, as things compressed into a space no larger than my window, the text afforded me limited purchase. I kept sliding off.

I’m not certain what I pulled out from the book. Any grand metaphors about aging, or death, or loss, or government overreach, missed me. The specific scenes that flood my mind are all from the within-story, the story the narrator is writing. It is very direct:

I realized that the woman in my novel had also become trapped in a tight place. At this point, I gathered up the pages I’d written that day, secured them under a paperweight, and turned off my desk light. 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. It happened quite often that my writing went far astray from what I’d imagined before I started, so I went to sleep without worrying any more about it.

Any attempt to allow the internal tale to be a guide to the main narrative failed; it could not withstand the pressure I placed upon it. I asked too much of the within-story, sought too much clarity. I think we’re all searching for definites, right now.

So it ended, and in ending The Memory Police became just another fragment of instability drawn from this stay-at-home age. I am certain there are people who can discuss this book in ways that uncover profundity. I can see a wide swath of fertile soil in which to plant any number of theories, but I cannot quite reach it. I have wandered away, into vague language and soft words. I have ended nowhere in particular. 

Perhaps there will be a moment in the future where something shatters my specific temporal link between The Memory Police and the global shutdown orders, and I can re-experience it with less existential dread. Perhaps I will be able to draw more from it than isolated nihilism. Once it becomes available on streaming...