What It Means to Remember: Ogawa Yoko / Novelist

Our guest today is world-renowned Japanese novelist, Ogawa Yoko. Ogawa's work was first published in 1988. Since then, her acclaimed work has been translated into many languages. In 2007, she received the title of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters from France. In 2020, the English translation of her novel "The Memory Police" was shortlisted for the translated novel genre of the prestigious International Booker Prize. We asked her about the themes and motifs that characterize her work.

Ogawa's novel "The Memory Police" is set on a small remote island. An unknown force causes objects to gradually disappear from the island. The inhabitants collectively lose their memories of those objects in the process.

People-and I'm no exception- seem capable of forgetting almost anything, much as if our island were unable to float in anything but an expanse of totally empty sea. The disappearance of the birds, as with so many other things, happened suddenly one morning. I had just begun to wonder whether it was one of the creatures I had seen with my father when I realized that everything I knew about them had disappeared from inside me: my memories of them, my feelings about them, the very meaning of the word "bird"-everything.

I think that memory, perhaps, is something that is unique to humans. Human beings are the only ones who can voice their memories and give shape to them. It's a very human thing.

Ogawa's book depicts a community who are forced to come to terms with a profoundly hopeless situation. She says that the story is partly inspired by the writings that Anne Frank kept while in hiding under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

I've admired "The Diary of Anne Frank" ever since I was a child. For a long time, I've been wanting to express the themes in my own way, as literature. To me, her story is about humans gradually being robbed of dignity and selfhood. Yet even as that is happening, they find their own ways to resist, even though all the while they're confined to a closed space. That's what I think about when I think of her Secret Annex. When I started thinking about what it is my characters should be robbed of in my story, I came to the idea that our memories are what define us. I realized that being stripped of your memories is an act of violence that is perhaps akin to having your very life taken.

The island in Ogawa's book is under the control of the titular Memory Police. The Memory Police attempt to remove all traces of a thing from the island when it is forgotten. They monitor the residents, and those who somehow continue to remember are forcibly taken away. Their motives are never explained. In one scene, the protagonist hides a character who is being pursued by the Memory Police in her basement.

I closed the trapdoor and unrolled the rug, but for a moment I stood there, frozen, staring down at my feet. I recalled the sound of his voice thanking me, a voice that seemed to rise slowly up as though from the depths of a swamp.

In my book, the Memory Police aren't the ones who are taking people's memories away. Their role is to isolate those select few people whose memories still remain intact. The outrageous act of drawing this line that determines who's acceptable and who's not. It's reminiscent of the reason why Anne Frank has to hide in her Secret Annex. That helped me flesh out the Memory Police in my book. What I really want to convey is that there is goodness in human beings. That's why I've depicted something so horrific. That's why I never say in this book that what is happening on this island is wrong. I never get into how things should be. All that I'm doing is documenting what's going on on this island. There's no judgment.

I don't believe an author has a moral authority to judge. All we can do is show humans as they are, how they would act under certain circumstances, depict both the goodness and the evil.

Ogawa says she was very particular about the way in which objects and the memories of them disappear. In a scene that depicts roses vanishing from people's memories, a brilliant display of rose petals blankets a river's surface.

Just yesterday, it had been an utterly unremarkable stream where, at most, you might spot the back of a carp from time to time. But now it was far too strange and beautiful to call it simply a river. I leaned out over the windowsill, blinking again and again. The surface of the river was covered with tiny fragments of... something... in an indescribable array of hues, reds, pinks, and whites, so thick that not a space was visible between them.

The scenes where things disappear were very rewarding to write. The visions that came to my mind were just so vivid and vibrant. They were totally a product of my imagination, but they were so incredibly animated. There's a scene where books are being burned. I think that books are in essence a repository for a person's memories. What is the most human act? What does it mean to be human? In the process of addressing these themes, I was reminded of what it means to write a novel, the significance. That was especially true when I was writing the scene where the books are taken away and burned.

"The Memory Police" was originally published in Japanese in 1994. The English translation was published in 2019. Despite the quarter-century gap, the novel has been called an allegory for our times, times in which national leaders have been caught attempting to cover up the truth, and the COVID-19 pandemic has upended all semblance of normalcy.

I wrote the book thinking about the times in which Anne Frank lived. But its themes also reflect the problems that we now face today. Perhaps you could say that's the mysterious power of the novel. My feeling is that it is the novel itself that morphs to reflect the reader's state of mind, or the state of society at the time. Sometimes I feel like it is the job of a novel to depict universal human experiences that resonate no matter the society you live in or the language you speak.

Ogawa was born in 1962 in Okayama Prefecture. In 1991, she received Japan's most famous literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. She's been one of the leading figures in modern Japanese literature ever since. This is one of her most acclaimed works of fiction, "The Housekeeper and the Professor." The book has sold over two million copies worldwide. It's the story of a mathematician suffering from brain damage and his interactions with his housekeeper and her son.

To the Professor, whose memory lasted only eighty minutes, I was always a new housekeeper he was meeting for the first time, and so every morning he was appropriately shy and reserved. He would ask my shoe size or telephone number, or perhaps my zip code, the registration number on my bicycle, or the number of brushstrokes in the characters of my name; and whatever the number, he invariably found some significance in it.

One time I became fascinated with mathematicians. And then another time I learned about the reality of memory impairment. Those two themes came together quite naturally in my mind, and that's how I came up with the character of the Professor. The Professor's memory is reset every 80 minutes and he gets a new start. For him, it's an unfortunate affliction. But at the same time, it's what causes this relationship to develop between these three characters almost as if It was meant to be. They each want to help one another. Each is concerned about the other. They don't want to hurt anybody.

I like to think that in that book I depicted something that everybody can relate to, that everybody experiences moments and relationships like that at some point in their lives.

The book is about the mysterious beauty of mathematical equations, as well as the fondness between the characters. The central theme of the book is the fleeting memories that leave us every day. The notion of memory connects much of Ogawa's work.

People die, but they live on in the memories of those who remain. Memories are what constitute the proof that the dead were once living. There's an ideal that I'm always striving for in my novels. That is to memorialize those who are no longer with us, to trace a person's footsteps and write a part of their story.

I want to venture out into the land of memories and find a memory that I want to preserve. Whether those memories are crystals or rocks or stones, I don't know. But I want to bring back one of those fragments from that land of memories. So, how do I go searching for those memories? There's a way in out there somewhere, but you'll never find it as long as you're not focused. The way in is actually hidden in the banal, the ordinary things that fill up people's real everyday lives.

So my job is to find that entrance in a grounded reality and bring those memories to the reader. And in order to do those memories justice, I endeavor to translate them into words that people will understand. I turn them into a novel.

With the new coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc across the globe, Ogawa says that 2020 has reaffirmed her faith in the significance of the novel.

What's going on has affected everybody in society. It's changed so many things in our lives and forced us to adapt. But even in the chaos, novels stand strong. They're thick skinned. They don't panic. Even in this time of COVID-19, people can read books. They can write books. This natural phenomenon of the coronavirus could not take stories away from us. That really struck me. We're still in the thick of the pandemic. So I think it will be quite some time before we are able to consider all this from an objective place.

Journalists stand at the forefront of the times and send dispatches of what they observe. Novelists, on the other hand, follow at the tail end of the times. A novel's job is to memorialize the past after it's all said and done with, and everything has ended. So, when you read a novel, you're retracing the footsteps of someone who has already gone through it. It's sad, but things haven't really changed. For example, in the sense that humans collectively are still unable to rally around and address an issue like discrimination.

Human beings, it seems, are burdened with this fundamental frailty. And no matter how hard they may try to deal with it in a smart way, they inevitably fail and all sorts of problems occur as a result. To me, I feel like novels have a duty to depict these kinds of universal truths about the human existence.