48 pages • 1 hour read
The Memory Police
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Chapters 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
The narrator makes arrangements to throw the old man a birthday party in R’s cave-like room. Food is scarce, and she only manages to gather a few foods—chicken and fish as well as pea soup, salad, sautéed mushrooms, and a tiny cake. She also finds a wine-like variety of moonshine made behind the hardware store.
R gifts the old man a music box—this is an object that has disappeared, and the music seems like a magic “trick” to the old man and the protagonist, who adds, “as I listened, transfixed, I felt the same slow, spinning sensation that I felt every time something disappeared” (144).
Even though the object doesn’t trigger any memories, R urges the old man to keep it and listen to it from time to time. They discuss how seeing objects that have disappeared can be “disturbing,” like “tossing something hard and thorny into a peaceful pond,” for the narrator (147). The old man agrees to try to listen to the music box. When it stops playing, there is a knock at the door.
Chapter 17 Summary
The characters discuss not answering the door since they are all hidden in the secret room, but the old man convinces the narrator to answer after the Memory Police continue to knock. They leave R in the secret room, but a tiny corner of the rug that covers the trapdoor is turned up; the narrator thinks of the music box melody to calm herself during the police raid.
The Memory Police do not notice the rug or trapdoor, but during their search of her home, they find a datebook that the narrator forgot to burn. An officer says that the “disappearance of calendars means that we no longer have any use for days and dates. You know what happens if we keep things around us that should have gone away” (154). He sets the datebook on fire and tosses it out of a window and into the river.
After the Memory Police leave the house, the narrator, the old man, and some of her neighbors watch them take a fugitive and the couple who were housing him from a nearby house, leaving behind their dog.
Later that night, the protagonist sobs in R’s secret room. R says her “heart is doing everything it can to preserve its existence” (158). In his embrace, she stops crying, and they kiss.
Chapter 18 Summary
This chapter begins with a long manuscript excerpt—the typist has lost track of days in the clocktower, which only tells hours painfully loudly. In her prison, she finds a bathroom with a window and a few forgotten objects, like a wire puzzle. Her typing instructor does “all sorts of things” to her on a cot he carries to the clockworks room (162).
The typist’s jailer bathes and feeds her regularly and makes her clothes out of odd materials, like paper, metal, and fruit leaves. The typist disassociates from her body, saying, “When the voice that links the body to the soul vanishes, there is no way to put into words one’s feelings or will. I am reduced to pieces in no time” (166). Watching the street below, the typist realizes she can’t understand any words other than the ones spoken by her captor.
In the main narrative, the protagonist avoids going into the secret room after sleeping with R. After finishing writing for the day—presumably composing the manuscript pages at the beginning of this chapter—she takes out the DIY intercom and listens to R bathe. She thinks her writing will become a way to reconnect with R.
Chapters 16-18 Analysis
The old man’s birthday party alludes to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—the narrator decides to go shopping and decorates the secret room with “dried herbs and wildflowers” (140) in Chapter 16. In Chapter 18’s section of the story-within-a-story, the allusion to Woolf is reinforced by the clock tower’s “bell that rings twice a day, at eleven in the morning and five in the afternoon” (160); the clock (Big Ben) strikes throughout Mrs. Dalloway, and most of Woolf’s main narrative covers a time span that includes 11 o’clock.
The technique of using multiple narratives (or times) throughout Mrs. Dalloway also appears in this book in the mirroring and juxtaposing between the manuscript about the typist and Ogawa’s main narrative about the novelist. Most notably, the scene in the manuscript in which the teacher bathes the typist reflects the protagonist listening to R bathe; the former is explicitly non-consensual, and the latter is an invasion of privacy.
The loss of language that the typist experiences—words sounding like “the random squeaking of an out-of-tune instrument” (167)—mirrors the old man and the protagonist losing the word for music box, a “beautiful word” that is like “the name of a rare animal or flower” (145). Between chapters of the main narrative, the music box song becomes a song of resistance—a mental distraction that allows the protagonist to keep calm while hiding a fugitive.
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