48 pages • 1 hour read
Yoko OgawaThe Memory Police
Yoko OgawaFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
The narrator meets R. in the lobby of the publishing house and offers a safe house but doesn’t disclose its location. R hesitates, not wanting to leave his pregnant wife. The protagonist tells him the plan—meeting the old man at Central Station—and leaves him to decide.
Wednesday, the day of the meeting, it begins pouring rain; when R and the old man are late, the narrator prays. The men eventually arrive, and she introduces them, still without naming the old man, calling him “our collaborator, a friend of my family since long before I was born” (76). They all drink tea together, and the narrator and the old man show R to his secret room. R says the room is “like a cave floating in the sky” (77). The old man demonstrates the amenities, such as how to use the DIY toilet and intercom system. The narrator decides to let R sleep and closes the trapdoor, covering it with a rug, for the night.
Chapter 11 Summary
The next 10 days are a period of adjustment—figuring out scheduling for meals, obtaining needed items for R (like books), and transferring water. They share desserts, such as cookies baked by the old man, after dinner and talk about R’s ability to remember.
R and the narrator discuss the role of the heart (meaning emotions) in memory-making. Their sensations of forgetting are contrasted with a seed simile: R has seeds of faded memories, while she has “no seeds [...] waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes” (82).
The morning after this conversation, the publishing house calls the narrator with information about her new editor. They meet, and he remains unnamed, with a “face so ordinary that it was difficult to make out the expression it wore” (83). He asks the protagonist about her progress with the novel, and she asks about R. It seems no one knows where he went, but he has vanished without suspicion.
The old man and R’s wife set up a system to communicate and send items through a box for meteorological instruments in an abandoned elementary school’s courtyard. Returning from a trip, the old man updates the narrator on the wife’s condition—she is about to give birth at her parents’ house—and gives her the package for R.
Chapter 12 Summary
This chapter begins with the novel-within-the-novel. The typist recollects meeting her typing teacher and the timed tests he administered to her class. Her narration turns to three months later, when she becomes her teacher’s lover after being the only student who arrived to class in a snowstorm. His touch makes her feel like she’s “locked inside the typewriter” (92).
The main narrative resumes with the protagonist and R looking over these manuscript pages before she shows them to the new editor. R asks for additional tasks, and she finds odd jobs he can do in the secret room, like sharpening pencils.
While their cohabitation is going smoothly, photographs disappear. R tries to stop the narrator from burning her photos, and they debate, but he gives up after she says, “Why would I keep them when I don’t think I will be able to recall the meaning of the word ‘photograph’ much longer” (95).
Shortly after this disappearance, all types of fruit disappear—starting with them falling from trees. The chapter ends with the winter’s first snowfall and fallen fruit disappearing under the snow.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
The captivity narrative develops with R settling into his “cave floating in the sky” (77)—here, he is beginning to be forgotten by the publishing house and the police, but he is still in touch with his wife. Books are an important component in his hideaway, and this collection will grow in significance in later chapters when novels become contraband. The odd jobs that the narrator finds for R will appear in her novel eventually as well.
In a moment of foreshadowing, the embedded manuscript places the typist in a snowstorm. At the beginning of Chapter 5, the old man mentioned how it hadn’t snowed on the island for 10 years, and at the end of Chapter 12, it starts to snow. The love story in the manuscript also foreshadows the romance that develops in later chapters between the protagonist and R.
While the specifics of how the disappearances occur are never detailed, the device of causing selective memory loss allows for an exploration of language acquisition. Ogawa is engaging in the discourse of structuralism (a linguistic theory of relationships between signifier and signified by writers such as Levi-Strauss and Saussure). The Memory Police break the links between words and associations to those words—connotative and denotative meanings—and this profoundly affects the craft of writing as well as other arts.
The art—and word—that disappears before fiction is photographs, and the connection between photos and memories evokes the film Blade Runner. In that dystopic work, loosely based on a novel by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, photographs likely serve as a way to preserve memory. Many questions are raised about emotional interconnectivity without one of the strongest memory triggers. Central to these discussions is the heart—and often the soul. Prayer also becomes an important motif after the protagonist returns to a lost practice of praying (much like the long-absent snow) in Chapter 10.
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