Tag: Yoko Ogawa

The Memory Police

Kathryn1 Comment

The Memory Police
Japanese Title: 密やかな結晶 (Hisoyaka na kesshō)
Author: Yoko Ogawa (小川 洋子)
Translator: Stephen Snyder
Publication Year: 1994 (Japan); 2019 (United States)
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Pages: 274

The Memory Police is set on an island isolated from the rest of the world. The island is large enough to support a hospital, a university, and even a publishing company, but its community is small enough for people to be able to gather together for significant events. Like her parents before her, the narrator has lived on this island her entire life, and she takes its idiosyncrasies for granted.

The narrator’s island is cozy, with lovely bakeries and gardens. No one seems worried about money, and the narrator is able to live in a comfortable house despite the fact that the only work she does is to write novels that, by her own admission, no one reads. The narrator focuses her attention on the small details of everyday life, and it’s only gradually that the peacefulness and nostalgia of the narrative begin to unravel.

Every so often an object will “disappear.” Almost overnight, whatever has disappeared will vanish not just from the world, but from everyone’s memory as well. It’s not entirely clear how or why this works, but no one questions it. In some instances, such as perfume and photographs, the objects that disappear must be discarded, usually by means of being ritually thrown into a river or incinerated. In other cases, such as when the concept of “fruit” disappears, all the fruit on the island literally falls from the trees to the ground. Once something disappears, all perception of it disappears as well, and people aren’t able to recognize something that’s disappeared even if they’re looking at it. Even idiomatic expressions change, as with “to hit two creatures with one stone” after birds disappear. The world of the narrator is limited, but her attention to detail is precise, so even small disappearances take on an emotional weight for the reader.

Some people don’t lose their memories, however, and this is where the eponymous memory police come in. This is also where the novel becomes dystopian, with midnight arrests, people suddenly going missing, families fleeing, and all records of these incidents buried deep within an impenetrable bureaucracy. The narrator’s mother, who worked as a sculptor and kept a variety of disappeared objects hidden in a cabinet, was an early casualty of the memory police, leaving the narrator an orphan.

The narrator gradually realizes that her editor is also immune to disappearances, and she resolves to keep him safe by concealing him in a sealed room in the basement of her house while his pregnant wife flees to a rural area north of town, ostensibly for the sake for her health. As her editor continues to read and comment on the narrator’s manuscript in secret, an intimacy develops between them, which is reflected in the strange and surreal excerpts from her novel interspersed throughout the main story.

As the novel progresses, the rate of disappearances increases, an alarming trend that is exacerbated by environmental disaster. At the end of the story, the concept of “disappearances” is followed to its logical conclusion in an undeniably disturbing yet surprisingly soft and gentle manner.

The Memory Police is dystopian horror fiction reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale, but it’s also a meditation on the ghosts that quietly follow us without ever attracting our notice. There may be no memory police in the real world, but we still forget things all the time, and we forget them so thoroughly that we don’t even realize we’ve forgotten them. The narrator is just as susceptible to these small disappearances as everyone else, but what sets her apart is that she understands the value of remembering and the importance of preservation. By maintaining a diversity of small narratives, the larger narrative represented by the memory police – namely, that which is not productive must be aggressively forgotten – can be resisted. The novel works on multiple levels as historical and political allegory, but it’s also universal and deeply personal.

The Memory Police was originally published in 1994, but it feels contemporary, fresh, and relevant. There are no specific cultural markers in the text, and most character names are abbreviated as single letters, a device that confers an air of timelessness to the story. This novel is therefore accessible to a broad general audience with no knowledge of Japan, and the translation is gorgeous. The Memory Police is brilliant and extraordinary, and it refuses to be forgotten.

Revenge

Kathryn3 Comments

Revenge

Title: Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Japanese Title: 寡黙な死骸 みだらな弔い
(Kamoku na shigai, midara no tomurai)
Author: Ogawa Yōko (小川 洋子)
Translator: Stephen Snyder
Publication Year: 2013 (America); 1998 (Japan)
Publisher: Picador
Pages: 162

Ogawa Yōko is a writer of the fantastic who spins softly glittering tales of quiet desperation. In Japan, she’s known for her magical realism, which is so subtle as to be almost Todorovian in the uncertainty it generates. Nevertheless, her first novel to appear in English translation, The Housekeeper and the Professor, is about kind-hearted people behaving nobly in the face of senescence and overcoming emotional adversity by opening their hearts to one another. It’s a good book even despite its clinging miasma of Hallmark-style sentimentality, but the way the novel was marketed made it feel as if its publisher were trying to pass Ogawa off as the next Yoshimoto Banana, which she most decidedly is not. Messages of hope and moral fortitude are few and far between in Ogawa’s work, and her next novel to appear in translation, Hotel Iris, is about ephebophilia and sadomasochism in a decaying seaside town. The novel is quite short and, given its subject matter, an odd choice for translation, but perhaps its publishers saw a faint connection to Yoshimoto’s Goodbye Tsugumi, which explores similar themes (albeit in an infinitely more upbeat and chipper manner).

I am therefore interested in the way in which Ogawa’s newest work to appear in translation, Revenge, is pitched to potential readers. Short blurbs from Junot Díaz and Hilary Mantel appear on the back cover, but the writer who bears the honor of having his praise appear right in the middle of the front cover is Joe Hill. Joe Hill is the author of several novels, comic books, and Kindle singles, and he’s known as a writer of grisly and violent mystery fiction. Hill’s debut work, 20th Century Ghosts, is a collection of stories that contain more subtle disquiet than they do splattered blood. My favorite is “Voluntary Committal,” in which a seriously disturbed man builds an elaborate crawl-through maze of cardboard boxes in his basement, which eventually becomes a portal to another dimension. 20th Century Ghosts has won all sorts of awards, from the Bram Stoker Award to the British Fantasy Award, but Hill is still considered a horror writer; and, by association, Ogawa is positioned as a horror writer as well. As if Hill’s name alone were not enough to convey the message, the cover of the North American edition of Revenge is designed to resemble dead skin stitched with rotting thread.

Despite the implications of its cover, Revenge is less about hideous creepy crawlies lurking at the foot of cellar stairs than it is about the small disturbances in daily routine that hint at the madness waiting patiently on the edges of human civilization. For example, the first story in collection, “Afternoon at the Bakery,” opens with a scene of a peaceful town on a Sunday afternoon:

Families and tourists strolled through the square, enjoying the weekend. Squeaky sounds could be heard from a man off the corner, who was twisting balloon animals. A circle of children watched him, enthralled. Nearby, a woman sat on a bench knitting. Somewhere a horn sounded. A flock of pigeons burst into the air, and startled a baby who began to cry. The mother hurried over to gather the child in her arms.

You could gaze at this perfect picture all day – an afternoon bathed in light and comfort – and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing.

What you might notice, however, is the author’s focus on children and families. The detail out of place in this scene is a solitary mother who enters a quiet bakery to buy strawberry shortcake for her son’s birthday. The catch is that her son is dead and has been for many years. He died when he was six years old, and his mother responded to the tragedy by piecing together a scrapbook of newspaper articles about other children who died in similarly upsetting circumstances, which she describes in loving detail for the benefit of the reader. The physical deterioration of the cakes she continues to buy for her son’s birthday serves as an analogy for her own decaying sanity, something that used to be as fresh and wholesome as a young boy but now resembles nothing so much as rotting flesh:

Long after I had realized my son would not be coming back, I kept the strawberry shortcake we were meant to have eaten together. I passed my days watching it rot. First, the cream turned brown and separated from the fat, straining the cellophane wrapper. Then the strawberries dried out, wrinkling up like the heads of deformed babies. The sponge cake hardened and crumbled, and finally a layer of mold appeared.

“Mold can be quite beautiful,” I told my husband. The spots multiplied, covering the shortcake in delicate splotches of color.

“Get rid of it,” my husband said.

I could tell he was angry. But I did not know why he would speak so harshly about our son’s birthday cake. So I threw it in his face. Mold and crumbs covered his hair and his cheeks, and a terrible smell filled the room. It was like breathing in death.

The above passage is the dramatic high point of the story, which is otherwise sedated and subdued. The horror Ogawa offers her reader is not the terrified panic of a boy clawing vainly for air as he suffocates in the dark or the emotional turmoil of a distraught mother sobbing wildly in her grief, but rather the unsettling certainty that people who are irreparably damaged walk among us within a world that is constantly growing as filthy and old as we will one day become.

The eleven stories in Revenge are very loosely connected, with each almost fitting into the next like a section of a puzzle box that has been warped by humidity. The major theme connecting the stories is ultimate futility of the attempt to outlast the relentless march of time through creative endeavors or the preservation of a material legacy, and the collection is filled with unremarkable deaths, lonely rooms stuffed with junk, and putrefying fruit and vegetables. It’s dark stuff, to be sure, but Ogawa’s language and narrative skill, rendered beautifully in Stephen Synder’s translation, allow the reader to experience the horror of the stories in Revenge as so mundane as to be almost comforting.

NPR listed Snyder’s translation of Revenge as one of the best books released in 2013, and it’s in good company. Despite Picador’s gruesome cover, Ogawa’s stories have much more in common with her listmate Karen Russell’s debut collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves than any of the recent work by Joe Hill or Peter Straub – or any of the recent work of Murakami Haruki, to whom many reviewers feel compelled to compare Ogawa for some inexplicable reason. Ogawa has her own style of haunting and meticulously crafted fiction, and I can only hope that more of her short stories find their way into English translation, the sooner the better.

Hotel Iris

Kathryn5 Comments

Title: Hotel Iris
Japanese Title: ホテルアイリス
Author: Ogawa Yōko (小川洋子)
Translator: Stephen Snyder
Publication Year: 2010 (America); 1996 (Japan)
Publisher: Picador
Pages: 164

Hotel Iris is the third work by Ogawa Yōko to appear in print in America, following The Housekeeper and the Professor and The Diving Pool. Having read several of her works now, I think I am starting to get a feel for her style of writing, which is beautifully conveyed by translator Stephen Snyder. Ogawa takes the everyday and imbues it with a sense of strangeness. Nothing overtly fantastic happens in her stories, but everything is always a little unsettling. Something is always a little bit off. There is always a sinister current running underneath the mundane. In Ogawa’s novels, the petty cruelty of human beings is on full display, but it is up to the reader to uncover the mystery of a deeper cruelty. The questions that aren’t answered are more upsetting than the questions that are.

In Hotel Iris, a seventeen-year-old young woman named Mari has been forced to drop out of high school by her mother, who needs her to work at the family’s seaside hotel. Since Mari’s father has died, Mari’s mother has taken on a kleptomaniac housekeeper, who not-so-secretly steals from Mari. When, one night, a prostitute flees from one of the rooms in the hotel, Mari finds herself attracted to the older man from whom the woman flees. This older man, who lives by himself on an offshore island, is a translator of Russian. He falls in love with Mari, who craves the sexual masochism he displays when the two are alone. The specter of the man’s dead wife, whom he is rumored to have killed, haunts their relationship, which is further strained when the translator’s tongueless, college-age nephew stays over for a few days.

These relationships develop over the course of this short novel, which is narrated by Mari, who hints at her desires, frustrations, and rich inner world through anecdotes and observations instead of through direct statements. The novel unflinching depicts all manner of sexual acts, but its eroticism and sensory imagery are focused not on the meeting of bodies but rather on the depictions of small, everyday things, like a stain on a scarf, the music of an amateur, or the dripping of pizza grease. The narrative tension created by the almost constant yet varied reiteration of certain themes, like the fear of something hidden being uncovered or the uncertainty of how far violence can go, prevents the reader from ever settling into complacency concerning Mari’s life and her relationships.

In the end, I think, this is a novel about growing up, and all the psychological baggage that goes along with the process. Ogawa warps many psychological tropes (like the Oedipus complex) through her protagonist, however, and Mari’s loss of innocence is neither celebratory nor unproblematic. In many ways, Hotel Iris is something of an antidote to feel-good chick lit novels like Yoshimoto Banana’s Goodbye Tsugumi. It’s dark and it’s disturbing. Its themes and imagery are understated; and, although it has quite a great deal of forward momentum, it is never driven by its plot, much of which is left vague. In my opinion, this is a perfectly constructed and beautifully written novel. Please buy this. Please read it. Please tell all your friends about it. Ogawa has numerous novels translated into various European languages, and we really need more of her work translated into English.