51 pages • 1-hour read
The Memory Police
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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Island residents are making rose sacrifices in the river, and the protagonist talks to an award-winning rose-grower whose memories of her dead father were tied to roses and now float away. After three days, the river is clear of petals.
The narrator visits the old man, and she wonders about how the wind takes roses and not other types of flowers during the disappearance, as well as what will become of the rose garden. He says he “doesn’t have much use for a library” (51) but went to the one by the rose garden to see if her books were there. They had been checked out, and this pleases the old man.
They talk about the increasing rate of disappearances as opposed to the lack of creation on the island. She fears that everything—and every person—will disappear. However, the old man reassures her that he overcame the loss of the ferry and the losses before she was born; he says, “as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance” (54).
The narrator tries not to worry, and the old man reminds her that the Memory Police are only after the people who can remember.
Chapter 8 Summary
This chapter begins with a section from the protagonist’s novel. The typist fears the disappearance of ink ribbons, which would mean the loss of her surrogate voice. She recalls how her lover taught her typing class how to change an ink ribbon and thinks how quickly she is going through ribbons. To explain her growing collection of used ribbons, she says, “I have the feeling my voice may come back one day if I study the letters imprinted on the used ribbon” (57).
When Ogawa’s novel shifts back to the main narrative, the protagonist is showing her editor the pages the reader just encountered. R makes careful edits, and they share cake and tea. She shares some memories of her mother (her love of sardines), and R asks to see the studio near the water. He finds the cabinet that once housed disappeared objects but is now empty. The narrator tells R about the memory from Chapter 1—how her mother told stories about the disappeared objects, like the emerald shining in the moonlight.
R reveals that he can detect the faint remains of perfume in one drawer and that he remembers the emerald; “I haven’t forgotten anything,” he says (63).
Chapter 9 Summary
The narrator describes how the winter is getting colder and more brutal, like the actions of the Memory Police. While no plants, animals, or objects have disappeared en masse, people are being vanished by the police. She observes that the “citizens of the island were by now quite accustomed to these losses” (65).
During her next visit with the old man, she asks to tell him a secret. He consents, and while they eat apple cake, the protagonist asks for his help hiding R from the Memory Police. They decide to use a storage space between the first and second levels of the house with an entrance in the floor of her father’s office, because this room was overlooked by the police after the disappearance of the birds. Ogawa’s novel breaks from standard paragraph form into numbered to-do lists for both the narrator and the old man—tasks include cleaning and construction. After memorizing them, they burn the lists, and the narrator notes, “horrible things were about to happen, but somehow we felt increasingly calm” (69).
The following day, they begin their tasks, such as burning her father’s research notes that were in the storage space, smuggling in materials, and remodeling. They cover the sounds of construction by playing records and finish a bed, desk, chair, and toilet for the secret room in four days.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
The disappearance of the roses occurs alongside the initial proliferation in the text of language concerning hearts; how disappearances affect the hearts of characters will develop throughout the novel, and roses typically represent love (and hearts). Roses also relate to perfume, an important element in the revelation that R can remember disappeared objects and still smell perfume (which the protagonist cannot).
The connection between R and the narrator’s mother begins in Chapter 8. Unlike her mother, who was seized unexpectedly, the narrator and the old man are prepared to hide R, and Ogawa uses language that draws upon Harriet Jacobs’s description of the garret/attic in her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and on Anne Frank’s diary. R, like the character Linda in Jacob’s book, will be embedded in their lives—between floors—but not as a full participant.
This section of the novel draws upon Basho not only in its reflection of emotions in nature, but also in its mention of the moon. Basho (like Li Bai and other East Asian poets) focused heavily on the moon. Another reoccurring natural element, the river, is a direct allusion to the Greek river of forgetting, Lethe, and indirectly alludes to the Silver River, another name for the Milky Way.
Like a river, the protagonist’s novel serves as a mirror for the main narrative. The ink ribbon in Chapter 8 reflections the first disappeared object the protagonist’s mother tries to explain—a hair ribbon; the latter is already lost, and the typist fears the loss of the former. A more overt reference to the craft of writing is how the narrator describes R’s role: “He’s the friend who knows the self that I put in my novels better than anyone else” (66).
There is some foreshadowing in the burning of to-do lists and the father’s research materials—later books and the library will be burned. The burning of the library is also foreshadowed by the old man’s comments about how the library isn’t of much use to him.
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