The Memory Police
The Memory Police
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Yoko Ogawa on The Memory Police
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A teenager under furniture with a notebookThe origin of ‘The Memory Police’ is not an idea but a physical act. As a lonely fourteen-year-old in Japan, Ogawa read Anne Frank’s diary and then wrote back to Anne in her own notebooks, sometimes crawling under tables draped with quilts to feel confinement in her body. That sustained, bodily encounter with hiding eventually produced the novel’s central scene: a narrator and her neighbor construct a secret room to shelter someone the authorities want to erase. The encounter also gave her the broadest frame for what writing is for.
I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was fourteen and realized that writing was a way for human beings to free themselves. I gradually realized that storytelling begins in the very act of putting memories into words.
The influence of Anne Frank on her writing did not stay in the past. When asked how that encounter shaped her work as a whole, she traced a line from that teenage ritual of hiding to the recurring architecture of her fiction.
If I think about it, I’ve always written stories about people shut in small spaces. This may be connected with Anne, but I have this feeling that small spaces are safe.
She has described the movement from reading Frank to writing ‘The Memory Police’ not as homage but as metabolic labor: taking someone else’s experience apart and rebuilding it in her own terms. That process is what separates influence from imitation in her account of the book’s origins.
I wanted to digest Anne’s experience in my own way and then recompose it into my work.
The result is a novel where hiding is not heroic but quietly desperate, and where the island’s systematic forgetting replaces the Nazis’ systematic persecution as the mechanism of erasure.
Alongside the Anne Frank thread, Ogawa faced a different kind of question about why she writes at all. In a Japanese volume co-authored with the Jungian psychologist Hayao Kawai, she recounted years of failing to answer that question in interviews, until Kawai’s argument about storytelling and death gave her a way through. The realization collapsed the question entirely.
I write stories because I cannot explain them.
How she wrote it
Images first, outlines neverThe unnamed island with no coordinates and no connection to any recognizable geography was not a deliberate artistic decision made at a desk. It followed from how Ogawa enters a novel: at the level of image, before geography or language or even the living-or-dead status of a character has formed. The namelessness of the setting in ‘The Memory Police’ is a consequence of the method, not a statement imposed on it.
My work begins at the level of images that form in my mind; from those images, settings and characters take shape. But it’s not particularly important to me what country the story is set in or what language the characters are speaking. My goal, in fact, is to create people and places that exist solely in and for the world of my novel.
The same image-first logic explains why the narrator of ‘The Memory Police’ is never named. Characters who arrive without names in Ogawa’s imagination stay without names on the page, because forcing a name onto an image that did not come with one would violate the terms on which that image appeared.
At the level of image, where my fiction begins, I have no idea where the characters come from or even whether they are living or dead. So it is beyond my abilities to give them names.
Working without an outline means the ending of any Ogawa novel is unknown to her until she arrives at it. For a book club reader who finds ‘The Memory Police’ deliberately unresolved, that open quality is structural, not evasive: the novel ends where it ends because she discovered that ending rather than planned it.
Since I have almost no plan or outline before I begin writing a story, I have no way of predicting how it will end up. As a result, I suppose the endings can seem ‘ambiguous.’ My happiest moment, however, comes when I get to enjoy the surprise of seeing how my story has turned out.
Ogawa published ‘The Memory Police’ in 1994 and then did not reread it for twenty-five years, until Stephen Snyder’s English translation arrived. When she finally returned to it, the book had changed around her without being altered at all. She had written it as something more like historical fiction, set in a past before her own birth, and what she found instead was a novel that her contemporaries were reading as prophecy.
I had no intention of depicting a near-future setting as a political statement — it was meant to be more like the past, before I was born. But when I reread the book for the first time in ages, I was shocked that I’d included a tsunami, and it’s frightening to think that rather than getting further away from the world I created in the book, contemporary readers are connecting it with the near future.
That gap between her intent and the world’s reception is one of the stranger facts about the novel’s afterlife: a book she understood as looking backward is now read as a warning about what is coming.
What she wants us to sit with
What survives inside confinementWhen interviewers pushed Ogawa to explain the political allegory in ‘The Memory Police,’ she consistently declined the frame. The island’s authoritarian Memory Police, the bureaucratic force that enforces collective forgetting, interested her because of what it does to specific people, not because it maps onto a named historical regime. Her stated concern remained at the level of the individual life inside the machinery.
I am just trying to depict each individual character and how those characters are living in their current time.
On the same point, when the Booker Prize podcast referenced a New York Times interview in which she addressed how readers were interpreting the book, her position was consistent with what she told other interviewers.
I had not intended to write a political allegory. [paraphrased from audio]
The argument she does want to make runs through Anne Frank. The narrator of ‘The Memory Police’ keeps writing her own novel inside the book even after novels have been vanished from the island’s collective memory. That stubbornness is not incidental: it is Ogawa’s claim, carried forward from her teenager’s encounter with a girl writing in an attic, about what creativity is capable of.
Anne’s heart and mind were so rich. Her diary proved that people can grow even in such a confined situation. And writing could give people freedom.
Beyond creativity under confinement, Ogawa has pointed to a simpler defense of the darkness that runs through her fiction, including the slow, quiet erasure of people’s inner lives that accumulates across ‘The Memory Police.’ She sees literature’s permission to be honest about human nature as its most basic justification.
People try to hide it from others or try to cover it up. But in the world of literature, you can reveal that nature, and it’s OK to do so.