48 pages • 1 hour read
Yoko OgawaThe Memory Police
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
While walking to visit her publisher, the narrator sees the Memory Police raid a safe house and take away those who can remember things that have disappeared in their trucks. She recalls that the police have only been around for 15 years. Upset by the sight of a young fugitive falling while trying to get in a truck, the protagonist drops her manuscript, but a nearby unnamed boy helps her collect her pages.
Once inside the building, near a fountain in the lobby, she talks with her editor, R, about the police raid and the possibility of genetic testing to find the people who can remember. The protagonist questions whether the Memory Police killed her mother after taking her, and R isn’t sure but notes that the “island is run by men who are determined to see things disappear [...] they force it to disappear with their own hands” (25).
Their conversation then turns to the manuscript. R marvels at the protagonist’s imaginative ability in the face of the disappearances. The protagonist voices their greatest fear: “What will happen if words disappear?” (26).
Chapter 5 Summary
Autumn is ending; the old man and the narrator discuss the changing of seasons, such as the absence of snow for the past 10 years and the old man’s hunch that it will reappear soon. They eat waffles, and she gives him a handmade sweater.
Winter comes the following day with a noticeable drop in temperature. The protagonist works from home on her latest novel about “a typist who loses her voice” (28). After midnight, her writing is interrupted by a knocking on glass in the basement, outside her mother’s studio. She searches for the key, unlocks the studio, and finds the Inui family outside. The professor, his wife, and their children are fleeing a summons by the Memory Police; they believe the professor’s research will be used at the genetic analysis center.
The narrator remembers how the Inui family cared for her when her mother was abducted. In the past, summons didn’t frighten citizens; after the protagonist’s family ignored the mother’s summons, the Memory Police came to their house and took Mama away in a luxurious car. Her dead body was returned a week later with a letter. The father read it aloud, but the narrator “understood nothing, as though [she] were hearing some magic formula uttered in a foreign tongue” (34).
Professor Inui refuses to tell the narrator the safe house location so she can’t be implicated in their illegal activities, and he leaves behind some of her mother’s statues—two tapirs and three abstract pieces. They drink some warm milk and the narrator clips the boy’s nails, replacing his handmade sky-blue gloves on his hands when finished, before the family vanishes.
Chapter 6 Summary
This chapter begins with a story-within-a-story: the protagonist’s in-progress manuscript about the mute typist. The main action of the manuscript is its unnamed protagonist climbing stairs in a church clock tower that houses a typing school while remembering climbing lighthouse stairs with her cousin as a little girl.
Returning to the main action of Ogawa’s novel, the protagonist chats with R about her familiar writer’s block, which has obstructed further progress. He says, “you can’t write with your head. I want you to write with your hand” (43). She passes by the Inuis’ faculty apartment with its empty balcony and visits the dermatology unit of the hospital where the professor worked to find he has not been missed.
The following day, she feels something has disappeared but is unsure what it is. It is not any of her breakfast foods, and she wanders into an aside about the disappearances of food items, like green beans. The narrator joins her neighbors at the river during the “most beautiful disappearance ever” (48)—the disappearance of roses. Covered in rose petals, the river looks completely different, uncanny. She decides to walk to the rose garden where her mother and father courted and finds it barren and empty of employees as well as roses.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Ogawa’s use of seasons in this section evokes traditional Japanese literary tropes. For instance, the famous poet Basho uses seasonal details in his haibun collections (a hybrid prose and haiku form). The turn from autumn to winter is a common one, but the novel’s island will never see autumn again; future chapters describe winter snow. Here, however, we expect that the seasons will change because there is a daily progression to colder temperatures.
The story-within-a-story mirrors the main narrative; both Ogawa and the unnamed writer twine past and present action, as the first-person narrator of both stories experiences a blending of past and present. In this way, the story recalls Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; in that novel, the action takes place over one day, as a high-society woman prepares to host a party, but the narration follows the thoughts and memories of the characters and thus moves back and forth in time.
R, the protagonist’s editor, is the first—and only—character to be referred to by an initial letter. He is between the unnamed characters (the protagonist, her family, the nurse, and the old man) and the characters who get a full familial name (the Inuis). This will come to represent his potential to escape the Memory Police, since the named family is on a journey to escape the police state.
The fugitive narrative of the Inui family resembles narratives about the Underground Railroad for African Americans as well as Jews escaping Nazis during the Holocaust. While the sky-blue gloves will return in a later chapter, it seems that the Inui family has—at least temporarily—dropped off the radar.
Roses and the rose-covered river becoming “strange” to the islanders is the first major example of the uncanny in Ogawa’s novel. Freud developed the concept of “the uncanny”—which describes a phenomenon in which familiar objects are made unfamiliar—in an essay about German author E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story “The Sandman.” The uncanny and estrangement are rooted in the gothic genre as well as in speculative and dystopian fictions.
