The Memory Police

The second of the three major characters in the novel, the old man was the husband of the unnamed protagonist’s childhood nurse and assumes a father figure role (or grandfatherly role) after her father’s death. The old man—as she refers to him throughout the novel—experiences the disappearances in the same way the protagonist does, in contrast to R’s ability to remember everything. After the old man’s death, the narrator says there is “no one to share the terrible void in my heart” (242).

While his former job was working on the ferry, he is basically a jack-of-all-trades. The narrator says, “I have always loved his hands, from the time I was a little girl. They could make almost anything” (236). His sympathy for others, especially those who are different (like R), is very high even though he does not express many radical ideas about resistance; this is partially a generational difference (R and the protagonist are considerably younger). The old man tries to save lives and cares for the people in his life, but he doesn’t understand ideas about writing and the power of the written words like the protagonist.

The protagonist’s editor is referred to as R, presumably the first letter of his first or family name. He, like the protagonist’s mother, has the ability to remember everything, and this makes him a fugitive from the Memory Police. In the trio of main characters, R is a shared secret that the narrator and the old man must protect. He, like the protagonist, is a lens into the writing and editing process. As the greatest lover of writing in the novel, he also falls in love with a writer, Ogawa’s protagonist; this affair is another secret, but from his wife and newborn child, who cannot see him while he is in hiding.

Like the “careful” old man, R completes all actions with the “greatest of care” (57). He’s described as “large” when he enters the secret room, but over time the narrator wonders if he shrinks; she sees his “body blurring, his blood thinning, his muscles withering” (119). However, R outlives all the other characters. His having part of a name, an initial, hints at his ability to escape the Memory Police.

The professor is a family friend of the protagonist, a dermatologist who is hunted by the Memory Police for his knowledge of genetics. He visits the protagonist during his flight to a safe house and gives her some of her mother’s sculptures for safe keeping. His flight, at first, seems successful; the protagonist says, “the entire Inui family had simply vanished, as though they had melted into thin air” (44).

Professor Inui is accompanied by his wife, daughter, and son—these characters have a shared family name, unlike anyone else in the novel, indicating their potential to leave the system. Their cat gets a first name: Mizore. However, the protagonist thinks she catches a glimpse of Professor Inui’s son’s blue glove in a Memory Police truck near the end of the novel.

Like Mizore the cat, Don is another named character. The name Don comes from his doghouse, and the narrator wonders if it is referencing “Don Juan or Don Quixote” (174). He originally belonged to some of the protagonist’s unnamed neighbors who were captured by the Memory Police, making him also a kind of fugitive. The protagonist takes Don in, and he becomes part of the family unit established among the main trio of characters.

The story-within-a-story, Ogawa’s unnamed protagonist’s manuscript, also has an unnamed first-person narrator. Her author refers to her as “a typist who loses her voice” (28). The typist is a foil for both Ogawa’s unnamed protagonist and R; her character arc is one of slowly disappearing, like her author, while she is “locked away in the clock tower” (254), like R in his secret room. In the main narrative, Ogawa’s protagonist becomes a typist after novels have disappeared, but she must be reminded of her manuscript’s narrator’s occupation.

The relationship between the typist and her teacher foils the relationship between R and Ogawa’s unnamed protagonist; the former begins as consensual but becomes abusive, and the latter is non-consensual in that it is an extramarital affair. The typing teacher is analogous with the Memory Police in the main narrative: He steals multiple women’s voices, capturing them in typewriters that fill the clockworks room in the tower. His statement that “there are rules to govern the fingers, but not the voice” (131) reflects how the main objective of the Memory Police is to enforce the rules surrounding disappearances.

Ogawa’s novel begins with a scene between the narrator and her mother, who has the ability to remember everything. She is never given a name, referred to as “Mama.” While the protagonist’s mother only appears in flashback, her character informs how the protagonist interacts with R, who can also remember everything. Seeing how the Memory Police killed her mother—a sculptor—when she was a child inspires the protagonist to hide R (even without him asking her to do so) as an adult. As an artist who hides forgotten objects in her sculptures, the mother is reflected in her daughter, who embeds radical critiques of the Memory Police (represented by the typing teacher) in her novel.

The protagonist’s father was an ornithologist who worked at a nearby observatory where some important scenes in the novel take place, such as when the old man and the protagonist throw books into the library fire in Chapter 19. In this moment, birds and books are connected; the narrator says, “The pages of the book had opened and fluttered through the air just the way birds had once spread their wings and flown off to distant places” (187). The protagonist’s father forgets birds when they disappear, but it is his storage room—filled with papers on birds that the Memory Police overlooked—that ends up being R’s hiding place.

The unnamed island where the unnamed protagonist lives seems to be the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else on their street. However, none of the neighbors are named; when they talk about current events, gathered in front of their houses, there are minimal dialogue tags. A few neighbors are referred to as the former “hatmaker” or the “old woman” (248). They offer perspectives on the disappearances—fears about the future, cynicism about the present, reflections on the past—but aren’t very developed as individuals.