48 pages • 1 hour read
The Memory Police
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Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Chapter 13 begins with the snow that started falling at the end of Chapter 12, its presence now reminding the reader of its long absence on the island. The narrator describes how the “hunt for memories became a daily activity in the midst of the snowstorm” (97). Random house searches become part of the Memory Police’s activities, and they take the old man.
R and the narrator discuss this abduction; R tries to persuade her to wait and pray. She tells him she will, but the next morning she visits the Memory Police headquarters. The HQ is in an old theater and guarded by men who won’t speak to her, but she opens the door and goes inside. There are “pennants emblazoned with the insignia of the Memory Police” everywhere (102), and the narrator approaches a man who seems to be the receptionist. She asks to give her package to the old man, in person. Ogawa does not reveal the old man’s name but states that the narrator repeats it.
The man behind the desk says the old man is in another branch office. When she continues to ask questions, two officers escort her to another man with many medals on his chest. The protagonist asks this higher-ranking officer about the old man, and he will only reveal that the old man is safe and fed. After a brief monologue about the necessity of triaging memories, the officer gives the protagonist tea and paperwork to fill out with various identifying details. She believes she has been drugged but makes it home and talks with R about snow and the cave-like room through their DIY intercom late that night. The narrator reveals how she took her father’s sleeping pills when she was eight.
Chapter 14 Summary
Three days later, the old man is returned to his boat. The narrator visits him, making him soup and tea. The old man reveals that the Memory Police were interrogating him in relation to people trying to escape the island on boats but never asked about R. She imagines the escape and wonders if “there’s a place out there where people whose hearts aren’t empty can go on living” (117).
While the old man rests after his interrogation, the protagonist goes to the message-box at the abandoned elementary school. R’s wife has left a care package of underwear, books, candy, and a drawing of their newborn baby with a note about the birth.
When the narrator goes to give R the package, she notices that he is looking thinner in both body and spirit while polishing her family’s silver. She thinks, “In recompense for a mind that was able to retain everything, every memory, perhaps it was necessary that the body gradually fade away” (119). R says he’s enjoying polishing the silver, and the narrator tells him an anecdote about lower-class silver-polishers who lose their voices because their words might cloud the silver. She also congratulates him on the baby, and he muses about the drawing replacing photographs, which have disappeared.
Chapter 15 Summary
This chapter begins with the protagonist’s manuscript. The typist’s typewriter breaks, and her lover takes her to the room behind the clock at the top of the tower, which is filled with broken typewriters. Instead of beginning repairs, he polishes his stopwatch that he used for timed tests and eventually explains that the typist’s voice is trapped in her “machine. It’s just been sealed off now that it no longer has a purpose” (130).
He continues by explaining that the other broken typewriters are other voices, contrasts talking with typing (the latter can be controlled), and locks the typist in the room while he goes to teach.
Ogawa’s writer protagonist remarks on one connection between her life and the manuscript. The character and R are both in secret rooms and unable to leave. The next day, calendars disappear, and the burning of calendars brings the neighbors outside. The people of the island discuss the scarceness of food and how they won’t be able to experience other seasons without calendars turning over to new months. Despite reassuring each other that this won’t be the case—that spring will come—because calendars are “just scraps of paper” (136), the narrator intervenes and says winter never ends for the islanders.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
In this section, we see the Memory Police’s headquarters—the closest Ogawa’s novel gets to unveiling their operation. The police state is described in various ways; for instance, the prevalence of insignia evokes Nazi propaganda, and the HQ being housed in an old theater is a comment on the spectacle of their politics. In his monologue, the high-ranking officer says the Police’s “primary function is to assure [...] that useless memories disappear quickly and easily [...] there’s no point in holding onto them” (106). Under this guise, they exert control over every aspect of the islanders’ lives.
Furthermore, the luxuries that the Memory Police enjoy—from their clothes to furnishings and food—contrast with the scarcity that the islanders experience. The neighbors discuss the foods they once enjoyed but can no longer get, like “custard,” while the police have maids serve them tea. The narrator can only guess at the Memory Police’s internal hierarchies and structure by using the number of medals and number of subordinates each man has as a guide.
While the narrator notices one connection between her manuscript and her life, there are a number of other intertextual details—R and the typing teacher both polish items, and the voiceless silver polishers the narrator tells R about are like the voices trapped in the broken typewriters in the clocktower. The story of the silver polishers is a look at the writing process as well because the narrator seems to have researched voicelessness for her manuscript to have these details about the silver polishers on hand to tell R.
There is some heavy foreshadowing in this section of the novel. The police officer tells the narrator that “if your big toe becomes infected with gangrene, you cut it off as soon as you can. If you do nothing, you end up losing the whole leg” (106). Later in the novel, a leg is the first body part that disappears, but the legs are not removed because they serve as a way to distinguish those who remember everything (like R and the protagonist’s mother) from those whose memories are able to be erased. While the narrator worries about R’s diminishing body, hers is the body that ends up disappearing through a process of forgetting. Her voice will be the last part to disappear, contrasted with the typist, who loses her voice before the rest of her body.
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