But no matter what is disappeared, the islanders adapt quietly and without complaint, for they fear the Memory Police.ĭistinguishable only by indecipherable geometric badges, the Memory Police wear “dark green uniforms, with heavy belts and black boots. Thus does landscape externalize processes underway in the narrator’s psyche. Gradually, distinctions between objects, the stuff of meaning, are obliterated by the white and the quiet. At one point snow begins to fall and does not stop. Meanwhile, man-made structures are deteriorating, victims of neglect and entropic decay. Soon things are back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it was that disappeared.” “If it’s a physical object that has been disappeared, we gather the remnants up to burn or bury or toss in the river. faded, along with all memory of what it meant.”Īny residue of a disappearance must be destroyed. A disappearance is not limited to cognition: when perfume was disappeared, “the ability to smell the perfume.

Disappeared objects don’t literally vanish rather, they lose all meaning in the mind.

Things that are disappeared may be all objects of a type-emeralds, say-or entire categories-birds, say. About fifteen years earlier, things started vanishing: the narrator begins, “I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first-among all the things that have vanished from the island.” No inhabitant knows its size, its shape, or where it is.

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa