I had just begun to wonder whether it was one of the creatures I had seen with my father when I realized that everything I knew about them had disappeared from inside me: my memories of them, my feelings about them, the very meaning of the word ‘bird’ - everything.” And yet despite this, there it still is - “a small brown creature flying high up in the sky” - before fading out of sight. It was plump, with what appeared to be a tuft of white feathers at its breast.
When birds vanish, the narrator, whose deceased father was an ornithologist, recalls, “I spotted a small brown creature flying high up in the sky. The narrative arc of an object’s disappearance, however, seems not to follow any particular pattern. Hats disappear, and the local economy bends to the new reality: “the milliner who lived across the street began making umbrellas.” The vanishings occur during the night: when the island’s inhabitants awake, they “could sense something strange, almost rough, about the quality of the air. The items that go missing start out innocently enough: ribbons, bells, stamps.
(The island itself is shrouded in a metaphorical mist: maps have disappeared, so no one knows the island’s “precise shape, or exactly what lies on the other side of the mountains.”) The narrator, a female novelist who is never named, lives on an island where things keep disappearing. Celebrated Japanese author Yoko Ogawa, via translator Stephen Snyder, drops us directly into a great dystopia in media res and infuses the environment with preternatural mundaneness bordering on calm. The Memory Police is an exercise in minimalism.
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