Hello Gentle Reader,
Translations of Ogawa Yōko’s work into English are slim when compared to other languages. What has been translated, however, has created a sustainable growing interest. Ogawa’s most recent translated novel “The Memory Police,” became an unintentional relevant metaphor for the pandemic. A period where the slogan “the new normal,” and “return to normal,” infiltrated everyday nomenclature, framing individuals’ linguistic relationship with the events unfolding around them. This of course was a period of public health measures, mandates, and restrictions; following a cycle of lock downs and easing of restrictions, then abrupt return to point zero. Throughout the pandemic there was a continued sense of the world being reduced, redacted, or amputated. Gradually the concept of normalcy and the individuals own attachment or relationship to it, was being hollowed out. Inch by inch. Component by component. It was reduced to a point where the whole was no longer available, let alone recognizable. In “The Memory Police,” everyday events, objects, sensations, seasons—an entire catalogue of reference points—is wormed away by the titular memory police, who through metaphysical and physical Kafkaesque edicts, reduced the island world. Birds disappear. Roses become contraband. Perfume evaporates into nothing. The inhabitants of this world accept the gradual reduction of their lives with complacent subservience, all the while acknowledging their own self is being erased in the process. “The Memory Police,” was originally published thirty years ago, and framed as an allegorical depiction of an authoritarian society subjected to absurd physical redactions of their world. The novel examined the nature of memory, the art of reminiscence, the responsibility to remember, and the dangers of forgetting. Ogawa’s “The Memory Police,” is often juxtaposed against Orwell’s classic “1984,” because its narrative revolved around a totalitarian state attempting to subjugate an entire populace to its will, exercising complete control over their lives and reality.
The two narratives diverge significantly, however, in both literary intention and execution. Orwell’s novel explores unchecked political power and the inhumane measures in which authoritarian governments will take to retain it. The threat of independent thought and language in “1984,” is the foundation of the novels premise. Big Brother, dominates through a variety of soft practices, administrative procedures, and physical controls. For example, the Thought Police manufacture and maintain a cult of personality; while mass surveillance ensures abject compliance; the Ministry of Truth, disseminates propaganda, curates historical negation, and destroys any to all information that runs counter to the states positions or party lines; while the Ministry of Love takes more physical approach in compliance, through torturing, brainwashing, interrogating, and if necessary, exterminating dissidence. Orwell’s novel journeys through the dehumanizing hellscape, proposing the question what does it mean to live in this kind of society and what are the associated costs and consequences to resist it? Ogawa Yōko’s “The Memory Police,” never traced or examined the evils of authoritarian government regimes. The bureaucratic absurdity of the memory police existed in the periphery a component of the landscape and menacing shadow circling. Ogawa, fixated the narrative on a small collective of individuals, who preserve within the oppression of their circumstance. The atmosphere is intimate and suffocating. A world completely closed off.
Self-contained worlds, liminal spaces, private interiors, and intimate narratives, is one of the defining features of Ogawa’s work. In “The Memory Police,” the unnamed island remains severed and cut off from the rest of the world. In addition to this, the narrator conceals her editor R in a small room in her house, which is described as being suspended in space. These otherwise, normal landscapes or scenes, however, are always tilted off kilter. An atmosphere of dread or menace infiltrates the narratives. A vacant lot is littered with old appliances, where a boy suffocated to death. An abandoned post office is full of kiwis. A bakery’s confectionary kingdom is tainted by a shadow of a woman buying a birthday cake for her dead son. In Ogawa’s fiction the clean uniform surface of modern conformity society is a superficial façade, one in which pulled back reveals a grotesque and unacknowledged shadow. The grotesque does not translate into extreme violence or gore. A turner of subtle, Ogawa Yōko crafts and curates disquieting inflections tainting or revealing a shift in a character’s positioning and their interactions with the world that is slowly growing incomprehensible. Ogawa’s crystalline and placid prose is devoid of sensationalism and melodramatics, which maintains that Ogawa remains fixated on the characters perspective and their interaction with a world slowly sinking into the visceral.
Before the critically acclaimed publication of “The Memory Police,” in 2019, ten years prior a slim novel, “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” was published and warmly received by critics and readers alike. However, “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” found itself suffering from a poor marketing campaign. The late 2000’s was peak Murakami Mania with the publication of his long awaited: “1Q84,”, and publishers have (and remain) eager to capitalize on the next big Japanese literary export. “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” was adored by the reading public and critics alike. Yet, the novel was marketed with a lighthearted air, playing up a narrative that could quite easily become entrapped in kitschy sentimentality and coated in sweetened saccharine sensibilities. As the novel was marketed as heartwarming and hallmark oriented, void of more serious literary concerns. Personally, I kept a safe distance from “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” viewing it suspicion and disinterest. Similarly, the short story collection “Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales,” was equally poorly marketed, attempting to pawn off the interconnected set of short stories as horror stories, which would disappoint any reader looking for gore, dismemberment, and splattering entertainment. “Revenge,” instead explored the unacknowledged viscera beneath the complacent surface of polite society. “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” is not a narrative that has been excessively sweetened. This is not a novel that could be deemed bubblegum for the mind. Just as in the “The Memory police,” Ogawa has designed a surrogate family unite for three characters, who held together by a common thread. In “The Memory Police,” it’s the subtle resistance to the authorities, by concealing R who’s capable of retaining and recalling memories, attachments, and sensations that have since been obliviated. Whereas in “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” it’s the patterns and subtle intricate beauty of mathematics.
“The Housekeeper and the Professor,” is narrated by the Housekeeper, a single mother whose past and personal life is blanched to the point of transparency. An only child raised by a single mother, her profession is more circumstance and vocation then passionate interest. A single mother herself, the birth of her son initially caused a fallout between mother and daughter. The Housekeeper reflects on her own mother’s perseverance at a casual job, became a venue and event manager. This work ethic and ability to transfigure difficult circumstances are key survival tactics for a single mother living in a society where single parenthood is considered a moral failing where mothers endure relentless discrimination resulting in poverty and social disenfranchisement. Regardless, the Housekeeper is renowned with her agency for being amicable, agreeable, and professional, which is why she is dispatched to a client with nine blue stars listed on their card—any star is a note of a difficult client with particular needs. The Housekeeper interviews with a woman, who is hiring a housekeeper for her brother-in-law a brilliant mathematician, who lives in the cottage in the garden. The catch? Due to an automobile accident, the Professors memory stops in 1975, and his short-term memory only lasts for eighty minutes:
“It’s as if he has a single, 80-minute videotape inside his head, and when he records anything new, he has to record over the existing memories.
Aware of his lacking short-term memory, the Professor has clipped and pinned a variety of notes to his suit, one specifically reminds him of his lacking memory. Conventional pleasantries are quickly dismissed. The Professor immediately begins to ask questions regarding shoe size and telephone number, and showcases his mathematical aptitude for not only computing but also explaining the theories and equations in practice. When the Professor learns of that the Housekeeper has a son, he grows insistently concerned for the boy’s welfare, as he’s provided great autonomy and agency, left at home while his mother works. The Professor becomes insistent that the Housekeeper bring her son moving forward, which is in violation of the agencies code of conduct. The Professor becomes smitten with Housekeeper’s son calling him ‘Root,’ due to the flatness of his head. The three become a surrogate family, which is woven through with an appreciation of mathematics and a love of baseball. The remainder of the novel recounts the episodic encounters, challenges, and trials the family encounters throughout their daily lives and interactions. Math, however, is elevated not just as a quirk for the Professor to understand and retreat into, but becomes the focal point of how he interacts and engages with the world. His memory may fail him like clockwork, but numbers and equations, their logic is never changing, remaining a constant point of comfort and security.
It’s an extortionary feat for a writer to incorporate mathematics with such restrained, grace, and elegant beauty. The Professor finds comfort in the predictability and pattern recognition of mathematics. They are natural riddles which are solved, if only to heighten our understanding of the world. Mathematics and numbers are the foundations and the scaffolding of the universe and the natural world. Yet, their treatment by the professor is one akin to a musical or symphonic composition reaching a harmonic crescendo. Numbers are free from the follies and failures of people, and in their ordered realm they provide the Professor the means and the escape to understand the world.
“Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.”
As a teacher, the Professor is the kind of mathematics mentor everyone who has grown up to hate and avoid math (including myself) has needed. He is a complete 180 to the typical mathematics teacher who is more interested in sounding off equations and drilling quick computation. To this day a timed math drill is enough to make me panic. Yet, the Professor is not interested in the end result or the amount of time it takes one to linger over a problem, but instead to appreciate the process of contemplation, understanding the theorem in question, and how mathematics brings order to a universe which on its surface roils and boils in sustained chaos. He is far more delighted when the question produces another tangent and another question. Math becomes a sustained reaction of more questions and possible answers, but moving ceaselessly forward to heightened levels.
There is good reason why readers fall in love with Ogawa Yōko’s “The Housekeeper and the Professor.” Ogawa ensnared a trio of mundane characters brought together by chance and circumstance, and allow their confined space to blossom into an intimate universe. A simple story of love and friendship transformed and defied the expectations that it was a novel dripping in sugared mawkish second-hand exaggerated emotion, when instead it moved beyond the immediate and into the infinite, contemplating the nature of memory but also the underappreciated poetry and aesthetic beauty of mathematics and numbers. “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” is a delicate and sophisticated novel, one which never lingers over the details but continually expands within the possibilities. Airy would be a marvelous way to describe this novel, not because of its length or to insinuate its lacking robust depth or character, but because the language and style is free of ostentatious posturing. Other writers who might incorporate mathematics as metaphor or point of interest in their work, would certainly ensure it was a method to cement and confirm their own cleverness, by shrouding it further in esoteric complexity. “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” may not convert any to all suffers of mathematical anxiety to open a math textbook, but it does provide the context to math’s ability to provide harmony and order to a world, especially one in which an individual no longer finds themselves instep or in time with. “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” is a masterclass in understatement that assembles a surprisingly compelling narrative about three individuals adrift in the world, finding comfort and solace within the infinite symphonic composition of numbers and the interplay within each other.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
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