the memory police (yōko ogawa, tr. stephen snyder)

Several people have brought Ogawa’s novel to my attention. I had anticipated something moderately cute. An unreliable but engaging female narrator, coping with an extraordinary situation, assisted by neutral but sympathetic secondary characters. Set in a world which is removed from ours, but still recognisable and just about plausible. The Memory Police delivers all of this, but then shifts to become one of the more nihilistic texts you might come across. The Memory Police are a totalitarian body who disappear people and objects at will. People flee into hiding to escape them. This much is already reminiscent of Latin American or Arab dictatorships. (On the day of writing there are images of Syrians who have been incarcerated for years finally being released following the fall of Assad.)  The unnamed female narrator, a novelist, takes in her editor, as objects as disparate as flowers and photos are disappeared. The editor clings to his memories. At any point we anticipate that the Memory Police will be confronted, that the world will turn, that the struggle will have been worth it. But what the novel delivers is almost the opposite, in spite of a tsunami and a new ice age. The novel is as mannered as I had imagined it might be, only Ogawa then adds a layer of bleakness that is completely unexpected. 

the housekeeper and the professor [yoko ogawa]

When Christopher Nolan’s film Memento appeared, it contained a device which seemed breathtaking in its simplicity and full of an unquantifiable dramatic potential. The device is that of a man whose memory is reduced to a very brief span of just a few minutes. He writes notes which he uses to remind himself of the things he will need to try and remember when he “wakes up” again with his memories once again eradicated. The one problem with Nolan’s idea (developed with his brother) is that it is so dazzlingly original that it cannot really be repeated, as everyone will just say – they already did that in Memento.

Which leads to the question of how successful that film was in Japan and whether Ogawa likes the cinema. Because her novel, published long after Memento was released, employs exactly the same device. Given that this is a novel and its timespan has greater scope that that of a movie, the maths Professor who suffers from the disease has an 80 minute memory span, allowing him to develop quite a profound relationship with his housekeeper, the narrator, and her son, who is known as Root, because his haircut reminds the Professor of the sign for Square Root.

In contrast to the Nolan, Ogawa uses the device to develop a gentle, sad but affecting tale of the way in which the human instinct towards kindness and affection can succeed in transcending even the annihalatory process of time. In spite of his illness, the Housekeeper succeeds in developing a rich relationship with the Professor, which changes both her and her son’s life. The idiot savants of this world know far more than us ordinary mortals will ever be able to forget. Underpinning this is the Professor’s belief that mathematics, the art of which he studies, precedes and will postdate humanity. The mathematical laws offer a transcendent vision to those who learn to study them. The Professor communicates through maths and as the Housekeeper gets to grips with the science, along with Root, their relationship flourishes.

So, now it can be said, if anyone were to use this narrative device again: you can’t use it because Nolan and Ogawa have already used it. It is perhaps worth noting the way in which two separate cultures have chosen to use the same trick. Ogawa’s version is less viscerally dramatic, perhaps, but in her hands it shows the way in which the ability of humans to connect can transcend even the most extreme of obstacles. Whereas Nolan’s use of the device was rather more nihilistic.

the diving pool [yoko ogawa]

The Diving Pool is the second of Ogawa's books I've read in quick succession. This is a collection of three novelas. All three are told from the point of view of a female voice, each one on the point of alienation from her society. In The Diving Pool, a young woman lives with her religious parents who act as foster parents to a bunch of children; inspiring in the narrator complex passions of both lust and a muted sadism as she guiltlessly terrorises her younger foster sister. In Pregnancy Diary, the narrator is herself subjected to her pregnant sister's self-indulgent whims; in the final part a woman who is putting off moving to Sweden to join her husband who has a job there finds herself drawn into the menacing world of a nearly limbless caretaker.

There is more to Ogawa's writing than their featherweight narratives. She is what they might call a consummate stylist. There's that pleasure to be gleaned from reading her work of knowing that every sentence has been worked on, but not in an abrasive, ponderous manner. Rather they have been honed and polished, the rough wooden edges of words rendered now as smooth, yet unexpected, as a mirror. Ogawa succeeds in making the physical tangible: food has a curious presence in her prose, it's something alluring but also potentially revolting. Nature is Herzogian: as liable to sting as it is to caress. The depiction of the caretaker who has no arms and only one leg would appear to be something out of a horror movie, and the story feels as though it belongs to that genre, but the careful, cruel-comic descriptions of his method of making tea or opening a door gives the piece another dimension: maybe this man in not so much a figure from a horror story, more a self-sufficient hero? Ogawa's naive narrator opens up this space and the story is defined not just by what it tells, but also by what it might become; the writer playing with the reader's expectations in a delicate game of literary charades.

The interesting thing is that it's the featherweight nature of the narrative that allows the writing to get away with this level of suppressed potential: she leaves her audience wanting to know more. And we are happy to be teased like this on this scale; it never reaches the point of becoming grating. What we don't know is as important as what we're told. The unwritten text perfectly complementing the written text.

hotel iris [yoko ogawa]

Ogawa's short novel is set in a Japanese coastal resort town. Which coast it is set on I don't know, but the notion that all those fictional characters who participate in the novel, and the fictional town itself, might no longer exist, adds piquancy to a slight but finely written story of depravity and delinquency. One of the comments in the blurb, by Hilary Mantel, says - "I admire any writer who dares to work on this uneasy territory". This territory being the sexuality of a seventeen year old girl who enjoys, that being the operative word, a fraught and to-most-people's eyes abusive sexual relationship with a man three times her age.

There's much here that seems to resonate with foreign notions of the Japanese psyche. The use of sex as both a complex outlet for power games and a means to excavate the subject's confused interior landscape. Mari, the protagonist, desires the humiliation that her lover, the Russian translator subjects her to. Here is the pertinence of Mantel's comment. It is the kind of book which it might be said could only be published by a female writer, in this day and age. If a man were to suggest that Mari wanted this 'abusive' relationship, exploring it from her point of view, it is hard to think he would be taken seriously and would in all likelihood be read as exploitative. However, in Ogawa's hands, the story is strangely convincing. Mari is never a victim: she remains a level-headed appraiser of her situation, no matter how dangerous. We are in similar territory to the recent film of Norwegian Wood: just because you're going through something difficult and complex doesn't make for an inevitably tragic narrative. The resilience of youth enables people seeking experience to embrace strangeness; a strangeness which society, (in Hotel Iris denoted by the townspeople and Mari's family), cannot contemplate as anything but alien and reprehensible.

The book's effectiveness is not founded on its more salacious material, but on the way it gets under its protagonist's skin. The whole world is coming alive for Mari, and the translator is but one part of that world. At times the book's town feels reminiscent of Prout's Normandy seaside holiday resort; the seaside, with its unique rhythms, is a great place to grow up, to realise the possibilities of the adult world. Ogawa's prose offers precise descriptions and is unafraid of surreal detail (a plague of fishes, a lunch of multi-coloured soups). Hotel Iris is a book that succeeds in exploring the most provocative of worlds without really being provocative at all. By reducing the salacious to the mundane, she seems to suggest that we shouldn't over-emphasise deviance or sexuality; normality abounds in even the most rarified of situations.