 密やかな結晶 (Hisoyaka na Kesshō), by Yōko Ogawa
~//~ It's astonishing that this book was first published in 1994, the year I left school, and only 25 years later it gets an English translation! On an unnamed island people are under an unknown [en]force[ment] that will regularly determine if something needs to disappear, and usually upon waking citizens have the feeling that something has indeed disappeared, and soon find out. They then set about destroying all the objects that have been rendered "disappeared", and so each person's memory of that object fades until there's a sense of never having known of that thing at all. But there are those who still do remember and their gene code is wanted by the memory police in order to understand so they can finally remove all people able to resist this enforced loss of memory. The original Japanese title Hisoyaka na Kesshō translates to "Secret Crystallisation", but "The Memory Police" is both more catchy and less thematic, for the police who enforce the rules on this unnamed island come and go searching for those who are potentially being hidden, but are never a major plotting device, only in essence a part of the world-building, though the threat of their presence is always there. The protagonist is an author whose mother was taken by The memory Police when she was young, and some time later she was returned to the family, albeit dead. Some people who are taken don't return at all. While writing her next novel, the author/protagonist discovers that her editor is someone who continues to remember the disappeared objects, and a plan is put into place to hide him away from the prying of The Memory Police. This set-up sounds like pure dystopian science-fiction, and although it has been labelled with both, I hesitate to frame it in the science department. It's too easy. Nothing is done with those science elements, they are just there as frame-work. And that is okay, but the book as a whole pursues the story of the protagonist and how she tries to deal with parts of her world disappearing while trying to keep her editor hidden from The Memory Police. It is surreal, touching, and beautifully written throughout:
But it is not a thriller, it does not pursue answers; it is political and shows how easy it is for the individual to fall in line with tyranny, how easy it is to forget what freedom of thought actually means. This book does not pursue tension as cheap thrills, it relies entirely on protagonists working together for a better outcome despite the heavy weight of oppression bearing down; it forces the protagonist to try to overcome the burden of that oppression, even if it is only slight. In this light, "Secret Crystallisation" does seem more thematically correct, as those who are trying to resist the world around them disappearing are also doing so in secret, and that germ of memory that exists in everyone is crystallising into something more, something remembered. While there are some logical and non-surprising narrative directions, there is also a parallel narrative that exists inside the book that the protagonist has been trying to write, that of a typist who has lost her voice and is being held as a prisoner in a room full of broken typewriters. It is thematically interesting and probes the feelings of loss, fear, and acceptance in a shorter space, but also exists as an alternative voice for the protagonist. I wanted to give it a full 5-stars, but towards the end the pace just didn't pick up at all; it just kept steady and when the ending came, despite it feeling right and going where such a set-up could only logically go, I had the strange feeling of incompleteness. But, just maybe, that was Yōko Ogawa's point.
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