The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 15: Our October Book of the Month – The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, translated by Stephen Snyder, is a haunting and provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. On an unnamed island, things are disappearing and most of the island’s residents are forgetting all about them. It starts small with hats and ribbons but it soon escalates. When a novelist discovers that her editor – who, for some reason, doesn’t forget – is in danger from the draconian Memory Police, she concocts a plan to save him. Join us as we explore our latest Book of the Month.

• The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
• The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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James Walton: 

Yeah, and she says to the old man, “How did it feel when the ferry disappears?” And the old man says, “It’s so long ago, I don’t really remember,” he says. Not, “What on earth’s a ferry?” Hello and welcome to The Booker Prize Podcast with me, James Walton. 

Jo Hamya: 

And me, Jo Hamya. 

James Walton: 

And today’s subject is the book of the month for October, which is The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, published in 1994 in Japan in fact, but the English translation by Stephen Snyder came in 2019 and the book was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. It’s also set to be adapted into a film written by Charlie Kaufman, who co-wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film with a theme of memory erasure, which as you’ll discover or perhaps may already know, is not insignificant in the circumstances. The winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize incidentally was the Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated from the Dutch by Michelle Hutchinson, and a book as they used to say, that’s not for the faint-hearted. Also on that shortlist was Hurricane Season, a Mexican book by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes, which Jo assures me was a cult hit among younger readers. 

Jo Hamya: 

We should also say that the Memory Police was chosen as a book of the month because of some research commissioned by Booker earlier this year, which revealed that among translated novels into English, the ones that have sold the most for the last two years are those translated from Japanese with readers under 35 leading the way. So with all that being said, James, do you want to tell us a little bit about our author Yoko Ogawa? 

James Walton: 

Yes. Yoko Ogawa, born in 1962 in Okayama, went to university in Tokyo, got a job then as a medical university secretary, which she gave up when she got married, as was the style of the time and then while her husband worked, she wrote. Interesting detail here, she didn’t intentionally keep it secret, she said, but her husband only learned about her writing when her debut novel, The Breaking of the Butterfly received a major literary prize in Japan in 1988. Since then, she’s written more than 50 works of fiction and nonfiction, only a handful of which have been translated into English, all of them by Steven Snyder, the most famous perhaps being The Housekeeper and the Professor, but again, significantly you’ll see memory coming into it again, the professor has only 80 minutes of memory at any given time, and her books have won every major Japanese literary award. 

Just add one biographical detail relevant to The Memory Police, and this is from her New York Times profile, which says that Ogawa discovered the Diary of Anne Frank as a lonely teenager in Japan, and was so taken by it that she began to keep a diary of her own writing to Ann as if she were a cherished friend. And to conjure the kind of physical captivity that Anne experienced, Ogawa would crawl notebook in hand into a drawer or under a table draped with a quilt. And you’ll see why I mentioned Anne Frank when we turn to the book. Jo, would you like to summarise it? 

Jo Hamya: 

So the Memory Police is narrated by its unnamed protagonist, I think we’ll just refer to as the narrator. The narrator of the Memory Police lives on an island which is kind of terrorised actually by this force, the Titular Memory Police who govern disappearances which occur on the island and these disappearances are material, but they also occur in the minds of the people who live there. So initially they are quite small, perfume or ribbons or certain musical instruments like a harmonica, but they gradually grow in scale, and that’s something we’ll go into later. 

So against this backdrop, we have our unnamed protagonist who has quite a complex family history. I think her mother at some point was taken away by the Memory Police and returned and her body was returned to the family. She died under quite mysterious circumstances. 

James Walton: 

And the Memory Police basically arrest people who remember. That’s the problem, isn’t it? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, it is. They also arrest anyone who is found to be hiding objects, which are supposed to have disappeared from the island. They regularly ransack people’s homes. They can be read as a kind of allegory for a fascist state, essentially. The narrative of the novel is also a novelist, funnily enough, who works with an editor called R. R happens to be one of these people on the island who can remember everything despite it having disappeared and the novels that she hands him frequently have a theme of loss or forgetting or disappearance. So in this book, she is working on a novel about a typist who has lost her voice, which takes a quite dark turn midway through the book. The narrator is also sort of in absence of her mother and father is friends with an old man who essentially used to be her family’s handyman is how I read it. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, the nurse’s husband, I think. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, the old man is a former ferryman, but at this stage in the book, boats have disappeared, so they sort of hang out on his boat even though boats are supposed to have disappeared. 

James Walton: 

Well come on to that too. Yeah, and I’m not surprised you’re struggling in it, Jo, because it is a deeply mysterious book, but R does remember, doesn’t he? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes, and anyway, he is the closest she has to family. They spend time having dinner reminiscing. They often have quite philosophical conversations. One day it is sort of announced as a mass campaign that the Memory Police will be rounding up anyone who remembers anything they’re not supposed to and we get the sense that these people are being effectively killed even though the Memory Police insist that they are simply being experimented on. In any case, R being one of these people who remembers is in great danger and so the narrator with the help of the old man constructs this tiny, hidden, quite cramped room in her house to hide him in- 

James Walton: 

Which is why I mentioned Anne Frank, see it’s all coming together now. 

Jo Hamya: 

Which he accepts because his wife is pregnant with a baby and if he’s in danger, then she’s in danger. Despite this, I think the three of them, the narrator, the old man, and R, they do manage to make the best out of a bad situation. They become a quasi family in and of themselves but meanwhile, the disappearances on the island are getting greater and greater. One day it’s revealed that novels are the next thing to disappear, which leaves the narrator at quite a loss. She then, funnily enough, picks up a new job as a typist while still hiding R who insists that she should force herself to remember how to write novels and to retain what novels are. And this I think is a great overarching way to address one of the books dilemmas, at least for me, which is do these people actually forget anything or are they forced to forget things and how does memory in this book actually function? 

James Walton: 

Thanks, Jo. Yeah, pretty well done in the circumstances because it is a mysterious book, and I think one of the reasons it’s quite difficult to come to terms with is the English title, actually The Memory Police, it’s called in English. In Japanese, I believe, even though my Japanese is not tip-top, it’s The Secret Crystallisation, which is actually what the French in France, it was published as [foreign language 00:07:38]. 

Jo Hamya: 

I think your Japanese sounds a lot like English to me, James. 

James Walton: 

Yes. No, indeed and that’s… Well, my French sounds, quite English too. I mean [foreign language 00:07:47]. The Secret Crystallisation, The Memory Police is a sexier title obviously, but is it truer to the novel because the English one immediately makes people think of Orwell’s Thought Police and I reached myself for the old Milan Kundera quote about the struggle of man against power, it’s the struggle of memory against forgetting. And Western reviews did quite a lot of that, I think, saw it as a novel about totalitarianism because of when it was published, quite a lot of the US reviewers talked about how it’s especially relevant to the age of Trump and all that stuff, or if they wanted to be a bit more international it was about Japan’s forgetting of the war. Because it was published in 1994 in Japan with the 50th anniversary of the end of the war approaching. And Japan still, I think it was still officially discouraged at the very least, that people should mention what had gone on in Korea and China during the war, the Japanese. 

But my feeling is that seeing as a book about totalitarianism and an Orwellian dystopia and all that, and particularly seeing it in the age of Trump is a bit like when people look in pita bread and see the face of Britney Spears or something, that human urge to see something recognisable when actually it’s just a lot more mysterious than that. So you’d read in US literary journals like the government announce novels are next to disappear, but the government doesn’t announce that, in fact, there isn’t really even a government. These things just disappear and people will not take a word for it either. There’s another US review, which says, “According to an interview with the New York Times, Ogawa had not intended to write a political allegory, but this is where the success of the book lies in its ability to comment on the enduring human spirit in the face of priest brutality. So that’s what Western reviewers wanted it to be, but I just think it’s more mysterious than that. It doesn’t quite fit that Western reviewer’s desire to see it as a sort of Orwellian story, what you reckon? 

Jo Hamya: 

I think that’s totally right. And I got really thrown off while I was reading this book because I kept searching for references to anything like the Nanjing Massacre or Unit 731 experiments, and they never ever came. And I swear there was such great potential for me to be disappointed with this book while I still had the title in mind. And only when I realised that this great political fable was never going to come did I actually start enjoying the book. That being said, I don’t think it’s an allegory for nothing or that it can’t be an allegory for anything because I found myself thinking so much about what digitization has been doing to my life, that kind of process of taking material things away from me. Like money, I keep, whenever I take cash out of cash machines, I forget that I have it because no one uses cash anymore and it ends up in a pocket or a bag. And when I find it again, it’s like a foreign object to me, I have no idea where it came from- 

James Walton: 

Oh gosh, that’s interesting. 

Jo Hamya: 

… what it’s doing there. And that’s because I’m just so used to tapping card machines with my phone or my debit card. 

James Walton: 

That’s really interesting. I admit that hadn’t occurred to me. But in fact, if you think the book was published in 1994, some of the things that disappear in the book are maps. When was the last time any of us used a map? There’s photos. I mean, again, I can’t remember last time I saw an actual photo. Stamps, I suppose there are still stamps, but letters are far less part of life. 

Jo Hamya: 

Stamps, I guess, are kind of like a collector’s item almost in the way that some of these forgotten objects are collected by the narrator’s mother or by later on are in his attic, they become curiosities as opposed to something that you actually live your life with. 

James Walton: 

And they’ve completely forgotten about. 

Jo Hamya: 

And something else, because this book was being judged in 2020 and COVID was rampant and lockdown was around, life was gradually disappearing from everyone then, it was a great deal of uncertainty about what the outside world looked like because everyone was stuck in their homes. And so I think it’s more the case of unlocking the right point of connection with this book. I mean, there’s an argument to be made that it’s actually a really great environmental novel because a lot of the natural world goes missing in it, like fruit disappears. [inaudible 00:12:04] vegetables, roses disappear, at one point the narrator walks around like a barren rose garden, which is a particularly striking image, certain types of animals. And it’s really hard not to think of the climate crisis when you read those instances in this book because that’s kind of exactly what’s happening to us now. 

James Walton: 

But do you think we’re meant to mind about forgetting? Because in a way, the narrator’s caught between, on the one hand is the old man who’s quite relaxed about things disappearing. He thinks, that he says at one point “There’s nothing too terrible about things disappearing or forgetting about them.” She says, “Would you like to go back to your old life?” He says, “No, not particularly.” And most people on the island, as far as we can see them, seem to be like the old man. They get used to things disappearing without much fuss. So does the narrator actually, because life sort of goes on, doesn’t it? 

Birthday party, she gets a dog, she takes it to the vet, the waffles, whereas R, the publisher who does remember, thinks that forgetting decays the mind and that people’s lives are getting thinner and thinner. Do you think we’re being invited to think the old man is wrong and the R is right or do you think we’re being asked to wonder which of them is? Because things do disappear in real life. Right at the beginning, as I say, her mother says, “Things disappear from real life.” They do. 

Jo Hamya: 

But that kind of leads us onto my great conspiracy theory about this book, which is that no one’s forgetting anything. 

James Walton: 

Do tell. 

Jo Hamya: 

Well, it’s to do with your bugbear about the fact that- 

James Walton: 

Do you want me to reveal my bugbear now? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. This is a great moment. 

James Walton: 

Okay. My bugbear is whether it hangs together, really, there’s some mysteriousness that are deliberate. Like what if there is a government, what on earth is it up to? Again, reviewers kept saying, the government announces that such and such would disappear. It doesn’t actually, there doesn’t seem to be a government, things just disappear. People then forget about them, and if they don’t, the Memory Police come and get them. But the narrator keeps saying things like, I’ve completely forgotten about birds, but I don’t think you can say, I’ve completely forgotten about birds. If you’ve forgotten about birds. The old man continues to live on a ferry. And there’s one point where she says to him, “How did it feel when the ferry disappears?” And the old man says, “It’s so long ago, I don’t really remember.” He says, not “What on earth a ferry?” I wonder if this is, let’s put it as simply as a bit of a mistake by the author. But you have got a more sophisticated reading than I you. 

Jo Hamya: 

Well, I mean, we could do a whole other part too to what we did in our episode with Hank Kang and ask whether this is a question of translation. I genuinely wish I’d read at least a little Japanese to know whether in that version of the text that’s carried out differently, a bit more subtly, maybe the old man says something more akin to “Oh, on those great structures that we used to know.” As opposed to, “I don’t remember what a boat is.” But my theory for this with the translation that I have is that no one is actually forgetting anything. No offence to Steven Snyder, but that might be the fault of the translation or perhaps there’s a way to do this a lot more subtly in Japanese than there is in English without prolonging the novel for an extra 100 pages trying to circle around the question of [inaudible 00:15:27] 

James Walton: 

I don’t think we can say that this book’s probably great, but the translation’s dodge. But partly because we don’t know, and partly because- 

Jo Hamya: 

I’m not trying to say that. Well, you are the one saying that the concept is dodge. 

James Walton: 

I’m saying that the idea that these people have forgotten things is slightly undermined by the fact that they remember they’ve forgotten them, which means they haven’t forgotten them. 

Jo Hamya: 

Okay, let’s just get onto my really sophisticated theory. 

James Walton: 

Okay, your more- 

Jo Hamya: 

My theory is that none of these people are actually forgetting anything. And I mean, it’s not just one thing that makes me think that, partly because of how the nature of this forgetting takes place, which is that all the inhabitants on the island wake up and there’s some sort of thing, it’s almost like a disease or an epidemic where they know inherently that something is wrong. But then they start searching around the island, they start leaving their houses to try and figure out what exactly the forgotten thing is. And more often than not, it’ll be signalled to them by the Memory Police. The Memory Police will be walking around insisting that everyone burn their family photos or that they get rid of their- 

James Walton: 

Birds and all that. 

Jo Hamya: 

… ribbons or birds or whatever, or the fact that the trees are dropping all their fruit or what have you. And then they’ll go, “Ah, okay, so that means we need to participate in this act of forgetting.” And they voluntarily begin to burn more often than not, or whatever it is that they’re supposed to have forgotten. So it’s a very conscious thing. I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s exactly by choice because they are being controlled by a police state, but it is very much by individual design. And there’s this point late in the book where R and the narrator are speaking and something has disappeared that I’m not going to spoil, but he says, “You do go to great lengths to get rid of these things, don’t you?” And she says, “I suppose we do, but there’s nothing to be done. I’m sure that it will pass soon enough. I don’t know how, but sooner or later everything will fall back into place.” 

And he says, “But why would you do that? Why would you want to get rid of these things?” And at that point, she does feel a kind of twinge of, “Oh no, I want to remember this too.” Because the thing that she’s remembering is of particular benefit to her. 

James Walton: 

Some length to avoid a spoiler alert here, but I think we have to. 

Jo Hamya: 

I mean, part of this is kind of how memory naturally works. When I explain this book to my partner, he went, “Oh, that just sounds like ageing.” That just sounds like everything I’ve ever forgotten. But I didn’t actually forget it. It is still there lurking somewhere in the back of my mind. It’s just that life took over. And the very same sentiment occurs when early in the book, the narrator and the old man are talking about a gardener who can no longer garden. And the narrator says, “What will your friend do now?” And the old man says, “Oh, well, at our age, there’s no need to look for another job. So there’s nothing to worry about with the Memory Police. You can just forget about tending roses with so many other things to occupy him cleaning his grandchildren’s ears or plucking fleas from his cat, all sorts of things.” All sorts of worthy occupations to fill his time. 

James Walton: 

But again, he can just forget about roses when roses are meant to have been disappeared from everybody’s memory. So the two things are either the books completely flawed in the way it hasn’t actually thought itself through, or you are right, which obviously would be annoying, that in some way they have chosen to forget. I mean, could you even argue it’s a book about the desirability of forgetting, or at least the inevitability of forgetting? Things are going to disappear from your life, you might as well accept it otherwise you’re just going to cause yourself pain. 

Jo Hamya: 

I mean, I think that’s a philosophy that the book does try to consider, but it’s not a very attractive proposition. This is a question that the narrator puts to the old man in the same conversation about the gardener friend. She says to him, at this point, they’re talking about the fact that boats have disappeared, even though they’re on the boat. And she’s kind of saying to him, “It’s nothing more than a floating scrap of iron. Doesn’t that make you sad?” And he replies, “It’s true. I know that there are more gaps in the island than there used to be. When I was a child, the whole place seemed, how can I put this? A lot fuller, a lot more real. But as soon as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner too, diluted somehow, I suppose, that kept things in balance. And even when that balance begins to collapse, something remains, which is why you shouldn’t worry.” So I feel like he’s not so much concerned with the idea that forgetting is okay. 

James Walton: 

That passage to me seems to slightly back up your idea that I think the thing is it is a book that meant many things. I did enjoy it. I will, my bugbear has now been made and I’ll concentrate on the things I enjoyed about it. And the things I enjoyed about it were all the things it could mean. Only one of which is political allegory, I think. And that one, I think backs up your theory. It’s about ageing. When you’re a child, the world just seems fuller, richer, and then when you’re older, it thins out. And it’s also a book, it’s a book about other, so a book in a way about nostalgia, about the pain of nostalgia. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. 

James Walton: 

You’ve mentioned the fact that it’s a book about, could easily be read as a sort of eco novel. You said, and I hadn’t spotted this, that this can’t be deliberate, but it is a book that makes you think of digitization and all the things that have disappeared into our phones. And it’s also a bit of a book about writing. And again, I’d suggest that we want to see it the way again, that sort of face in pita bread. Again, another review, it says that the message of the book is we must remember to write because she turns to novel writing. That’s another possible inconsistency, to be honest, she’s completely forgotten what novels are because novels have disappeared. R tells her to keep on writing, and she bangs out the last 10 killer pages of her novel. But then according to one reviewer, the message of the book is we must remember to write and write to remember to ensure the survival of truth. 

And again, that seems to me to be cramping something enigmatic and dreamlike, which this book is, into something that’s far more recognisable and easy for us to deal with. And that seems quite reductive to me. Reading this book did remind me of watching that film Lost in Translation, which is about the irreducible mysteriousness of Japan to Western visitors. It could even be novel about learning to accept disappearance. You could even have a thing whereby the Memory Police are goodies. 

Jo Hamya: 

I think that’s far. 

James Walton: 

That would be pushing it. 

Jo Hamya: 

I think that’s a bit far. 

James Walton: 

But they’re the ones who are taking all these pesky rememberers away, who are making people’s lives of misery when actually be better to let things go. I think that is going a bit far, yes. And also you have to remember when I’m tempted to go a bit too far, her admiration for Anne Frank and her admiration for that Anne Frank is writing to create memory. So it can’t be that. But anyway, I throw that in there. 

Jo Hamya: 

The only bit that really sort of provoked a intense reaction from me was the fact that she starts sleeping with R, and I thought, oh, what a waste. Not only because R has apparently by this point, even though he’s the man who remembers everything, forgotten about his wife and child. Just because this was a book about a really great friendship, like the lengths you would go to to save someone that you love, but it doesn’t have to be romantic love. It can just be like, there’s a passage where she talks about R handling her manuscripts with exquisite care and that this is really touching to her because she can’t imagine that anyone would really, no one really reads on this island. There’s one library, but I think maybe only three or four people have checked out her book. The old man goes to find out, although to him this is many. The idea that these two could just have a normal working relationship full of mutual respect and there’d be no sex involved was really, really appealing to me. And then of course, they end up in bed together in an attic. 

James Walton: 

I must say I agreed with that. I thought when that happened, I thought, oh, really? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. 

James Walton: 

Because they were just such good friends, it was such a nice friendship. And also, it didn’t do much with it really, I suppose towards the end that we can’t spoil as a bit of what R means to her, but not really. 

Jo Hamya: 

Well, actually- 

James Walton: 

Can I put it to you, Jo [inaudible 00:24:29] 

Jo Hamya: 

Sorry, all I was going to say was that maybe, I think we were about to go in two different directions, but maybe we can briefly explore the idea that this book that she’s writing throughout the novel has some parallel with what’s actually happening in the novel. So the book is about a typist who loses her voice. Turns out that her voice has been captured within a typing machine by her typing instructor. It’s bit of a tongue twister, and he takes her to a attic. 

James Walton: 

Absolutely. I only just realise that as well. 

Jo Hamya: 

Full of disuse type writers. 

James Walton: 

Once more with the attic. 

Jo Hamya: 

And he says, “You are my prisoner now I’ve got your voice. Pretty soon you’ll forget how to do anything, how to speak, how to fend for yourself,” et cetera. And I guess, well, this is much darker than what is going on with R and the narrator, but there is that kind of sexual component there. There is that sort of component of writing for someone or writing to be understood. 

James Walton: 

I thought that was a brilliant portrait of a sort of abusive relationship. In the end, his is the only voice she can hear. He’s the only person she can see. Basically the rest of the world is, as he treats her more and more cruelly. 

Jo Hamya: 

But why is my big question because I kept the significance of the novel within the novel is, I don’t know, maybe I was wrong trying to read it within the context of the narrator’s relationship with R, I mean, it’s another form of oppression. Of course, these novels that she writes are small fables about what’s happening to this island, but it’s just so specifically like her own relationship, and I could not understand why- 

James Walton: 

It’s just not- 

Jo Hamya: 

… one was a tale of abuse, and the other was sort of the opposite, like her helping her very good friend/illicit lover. 

James Walton: 

I mean, R was a cracker bloke. 

Jo Hamya: 

Other than cheating on his wife. 

James Walton: 

Yeah. But he is stuck in an attic. And that’s another thing. Why doesn’t he just come out into the house from time to time? The Memory Police aren’t around all the time. 

Jo Hamya: 

Well, I guess her house has windows and she has neighbours and neighbours dob, don’t they? 

James Walton: 

Anyway- 

Jo Hamya: 

You’ve never hidden anyone, James, have you? 

James Walton: 

I think if I’ve hidden them in a floor, at night I might just say, you can pop out for it in 10 minutes, have a cup of tea, anyway. 

Jo Hamya: 

That’s so risky. 

James Walton: 

No, it’s really not in the context of, but anyway. 

Jo Hamya: 

I’m never hiding with you. 

James Walton: 

Can I put it to you, Jo? You say’s a great philosophical novel, what’s its philosophy? I’m beginning to think that any attempt, so I’ve sneered away at all these people who say, oh, it’s just an Orwellian political dystopia. But then every theory I or you come up with to say, this is what this book’s about, is seeming as desperate as that now, by this stage, in a way. I mean, you could argue, okay, so it’s a book about the pros and cons of fatalism. Say the fatalism is a dangerous thing because the eco reading, it’s dangerous to accept the loss of things because bigger things will get lost and that’s a bad thing. At the same time, it’s also saying actually just accepting the fact that things disappear is not so bad. In fact, it might be the only way to avoid suffering. Again, politics, we haven’t spoken much about the politics, but probably because not there. 

Jo Hamya: 

There are none to speak about. 

James Walton: 

And I can’t claim, I’m no expert on Japanese literature. I’ve read a lot of Ishiguro, who is, let’s face it, Japanese. And that’s a big theme of his books actually, when you come to think of it. Most specifically in The Buried Giant, which the giant is the sort of what’s happened in the past. And the question is, should we release this? And he said, this is sort of allegorical because he was interested in say, the way the French have managed to see turn their catastrophic war into the plucky resistance versus the Nazis, and rather than the French police rounding up the Jews or whatever. But is it better to remember what really happened or not? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. Well, I mean, they are very different books, but this idea of sort of, is it there, is it not, do you remember, do you, is sort of present in another Japanese work of fiction that I read at the beginning of this year. It’s published in 2022. It’s called Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi. It’s about this woman who is getting, I guess discriminated against on the basis of gender in her office, being given grunt work, being treated really badly. So she decides to lie about being pregnant for nine months, goes to antenatal classes, puts a bump, like cotton bump underneath her clothes. But then as the book goes on, it’s increasingly unclear whether or not there is a baby there, as much as the reader as to her and this thing of do you want it to be there or do you not want it to be there? I see very present in the Memory Police as well. 

And for me, all of the things that you’ve said could possibly apply, but I think it’s a novel about what you choose to care about, if that’s not too corny a thing to say. 

James Walton: 

No, go on. 

Jo Hamya: 

The narrator remembers how to write books because she cares about R and R cares about her. He’s there encouraging her every day, at the point where she’s only able to produce a word, he’ll look at the sheet of paper and say, “This is fantastic progress. Go away and do it again.” She writes a sentence and he says, “This is wonderful.” And she feels kind of flushed with love. And so she does this again until she’s produced a novel and then there’s that really touching scene- 

James Walton: 

So it was very unfair before when I said she bangs out the last 10 pages. It is quite slightly agonising to start with. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, no one does. And then there’s that really touching birthday scene that you’ve mentioned that takes place in the attic just before the Memory Police storm the house while R was hiding there. And things are disappearing off of this island but she goes shopping for days in advance trying to collect gifts that she could give the old man, finding any fish that she can to present on the table. And in fact, R’s gift to the old man is a music box, which is supposed to have disappeared from the island. And so these acts of care are actually what bring about acts of remembrance. 

James Walton: 

I was up to you, right up to the acts of remembrance bit. I mean, I think that’s right. I think there’s any number of beautifully tender scenes in it as well. 

Jo Hamya: 

But she does literally remember how to write a book. 

James Walton: 

She does, but the music box doesn’t work. They keep playing the music box and R saying, “This will remind you of all sorts of things.” And it just doesn’t. 

Jo Hamya: 

I don’t think that a philosophy has to be completely consistent to be true. What person is completely consistent? And I think the fact is there are so little care in this book overall, not just from the Memory Police, but there are loads of instances of cruelty from people’s neighbours, not even intentional cruelty, but at some point the narrator is asked by an old woman whether she has a hiding place, which of course is already being given to R. So she has to tell this old woman, “No, I’m sorry.” 

James Walton: 

But she doesn’t necessarily say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” In case she’s a sort of Memory Police spy. So she can’t say, “Yeah, I’ve got a cracking safe house for you.” 

Jo Hamya: 

Exactly. And there are so many points at which people consciously have to choose not to care in this book, whether it’s in regards to things that have disappeared or their own neighbours or the nature of their everyday existence. And I think sure, caring won’t always bring back these characters’ memory, but in a way it was really poignant to me that despite the fact that the narrator’s mother is dead, the only way that the narrator has access to a lot of the things that have disappeared from the island is because her mom cared enough to hide them inside the sculptures that she used to make as an artist so that they could be preserved. 

James Walton: 

Well. Okay, Jo. Well, I think we’ve made the very clear point that this novel makes no clear points. 

Jo Hamya: 

No, you can’t say that James, that was horrible. 

James Walton: 

No, no. You said it was a good thing that it made no clear points, and it is, in a way, who knows? 

Jo Hamya: 

I don’t know, it sounds like you’re slagging it off. 

James Walton: 

So having made the clip where there’s no clear points that you can make, even that there’s no clear point or something, we now face the tricky task normally a bit easier than this of who would you recommend this book to? 

Jo Hamya: 

This sounds like a really grandiose answer, but it struck me that second gen kids who come from maybe migrant or immigrant families would attach a lot to this, like parents telling them stories about where they come from, which is what happened in my family. And you are like, “Oh, well, I’ve never been there, but this has significance to me and I have no tangible material, frequent contact with that aspect of my life, and yet it’s hanging over me.” So I think it would appeal to them, but I would say read it with a friend, because probably as this conversation is revealed, it’s much more fun to talk, to argue over than it is to just sit endlessly puzzling about. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, I was going to say that actually I’d recommend it to someone who I’d be able to talk to about it so that we could work out what the hell it was all about. But I’d also, I think that I’m very pleased to have read it, but I still don’t know whether, I just know, I’ve reviewed books, a traditional thing to do when you review a book when you’ve no idea what the hell it’s about, you say something like, the meaning hangs tantalisingly out of reach, which means basically is the poncy way of saying I was scratching my head by the end. But I think for me, the meaning hangs tantalisingly out of reach. 

Jo Hamya: 

I think more than ever now I want comments under this episode from people who have read it. 

James Walton: 

And if you happen to know what it means, that would be great. But actually, of course, we were saying that you’re not meant to know what it means. It’s meant to start your mind racing in all sorts of directions, and it really does do that while containing some fantastic, many, many fantastic scenes. 

Jo Hamya: 

That’s it for this week. If you haven’t already followed the show, please do and remember to leave a rating. 

James Walton: 

You can find out more about our October book of the Month, the Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa at the book of prizes.com. And remember to follow us on, you guessed it, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Substack at the Booker Prizes. Also, we’ve recently launched a Booker Prize book Club on Facebook. So to find out more about that, head to facebook.com/thebookerprizes. 

Jo Hamya: 

And please do let us know what you think the Memory Police is actually about. Yes, yes, please do. Until next time, bye. 

James Walton: 

Bye. The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Meolo, and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht Productions for the Booker Prizes.