The Memory Police

by Yoko Ogawa

  “It’s a harmonica,” R said, when he was finished.

  “Har-mo-ni-ka,” I repeated, as though drinking each syllable from his mouth. “It’s a romantic name, don’t you think? The kind you’d give to a fluffy, snow-white kitten.”

  “It’s a musical instrument,” he said, handing it to me. Once it was in my hand, I could feel just how small it was. The metal was tarnished in places, but it glinted silver in the lamplight. In the middle were letters that must have been the name of the company that had made it. On the side where R’s mouth had been were two even rows of holes like a honeycomb.

  “You try,” he said.

  “Me? I can’t play it.”

  “Why not? I’m sure you must have played it when you were young. Why else would your mother have bothered to keep it safe? Go ahead, give it a try. It’s simple, just like breathing.”

  I hesitated a moment but then put the harmonica to my lips. I could feel a bit of warmth lingering from his mouth. A light puff of air produced a louder sound than I’d imagined, and I pulled it away in surprise.

  “You see how easy it is?” He smiled. “This is ‘do.’ Next is ‘re.’ Then ‘mi.’ If you just keep blowing in and out, you’ll be able to play a scale.”

  Then he played several tunes, some I knew and some I didn’t, but they seemed to calm me either way. It had been a long time since I’d held a musical instrument or heard one played, a long time since I’d forgotten their very existence. But now I remembered that I’d taken organ lessons when I was a girl. My teacher had been a fat woman with something of a temper, and when she tested me on scales—always my weakness—I had cowered down behind the keyboard cover. I had no ear for music and could never tell the difference between do, mi, so and re, fa, la. When I had to play with a group, I would just move my fingers without actually pressing the keys, to avoid ruining the performance. I carried my sheet music in a bag my mother had made, with an appliqué of a bear cub with an apple perched on its head.

  I wondered where the organ and that bag had gone. I remembered that the organ had been expensive and my mother had grumbled when I’d quit my lessons after less than a year. For a time, she had draped a sheet over it and had used it as a stand for one of her sculptures, but at some point it vanished. I suppose, over time, that happened to lots of things, even without the disappearances…

  He continued to play, his left shoulder drooping slightly, his eyes shaded. His hair hung down over his brow. He played extremely well, without ever making a mistake, and he seemed to know any number of tunes, from bright and fast to slow and gloomy.

  From time to time he handed me the harmonica and asked me to play again. I hesitated, embarrassed at my lack of skill, but he told me he wanted to take a break, to be the audience for a while. So I sounded out the children’s songs my nurse had taught me or the tune we had used to count for tiddlywinks. It was painfully slow, and I had no idea where to find fa or ti or how to judge the intervals, and since I wasn’t used to the breathing, I produced sounds that were too loud or that were so soft and tremulous that they threatened to fade away. Still, when I had finished playing a song, R would applaud my effort.

  The room was ideally suited to playing the harmonica. There were no noises from outside to disturb us, no telephone ringing, no one to come calling, and the sound spread to every corner. We could shut ourselves in for as long as we liked—the old man was sleeping downstairs in the tatami-mat room. Closed off as it was, the hidden room could become stuffy, and it was sometimes difficult to breathe by the end of a long tune, but then we would stand together near the ventilator fan and take deep breaths.

  When we had played every song we knew, we set the harmonica back on the bed and turned to the last of the objects that had been hidden in the statues. R opened the plastic bag and emptied the white pills into his hands. The bag was yellowed and had turned brittle with age, but the contents seemed unharmed.

  “Is it medicine?” I asked.

  “No, it’s called ramune. I’m impressed that your mother tried to preserve something as ordinary as this.” The tablets were round and dusted with white powder, with a slight depression in the middle. He picked up one of them with great tenderness and slipped it suddenly between my lips. Startled, I covered my mouth with my hands, as R grinned.

  It was so sweet it burned, but as soon as I moved my tongue to try to taste it, it dissolved instantly.

  “Did you like it?” he asked. The flavor had been so sudden and powerful that I merely nodded, unwilling to open my mouth and risk losing the lingering sweetness. “It’s a lemon-flavored candy. When we were children, all the stores sold them and there were countless ramune on the island, but now there are only these few left here.”

  R popped one of the remaining tablets in his mouth. No doubt it dissolved as quickly as mine had, but he continued to sit quietly and stare at the few left in his hand. I’m not sure how long we sat there in silence.

  “Let’s share the rest with the old man,” he said at last, returning the remaining pills to the plastic bag.

  * * *

  . . .

  That evening R told me the stories associated with each of the three objects. The ferry ticket, the harmonica, and the ramune were lined up neatly over the bed. When we lay down, I had the feeling that the bed was even narrower than it had been when we were sitting on it. It seemed to gather up around us without leaving any extra space.

  It must have been getting very late, but I had no way of knowing since the clock on the shelf was hidden by R’s shoulder. The old man had replaced the latch on the trapdoor, and it glittered in the lamplight. The ventilator fan continued to turn.

  “There was a pasture on the northern island,” he began. “A place at the base of the mountains where they raised cows and horses and sheep. For a fee, you could take a ride on a pony. One of the young women who worked on the farm would hold the bridle and lead you once around the pasture—but it was all over in a few minutes. I would call out to the girl to slow down and make the ride last, and just once she actually took me for a second lap. There was a cheese factory in the middle of the pasture. I used to feel sick whenever I went near the place. As soon as I saw all that cheese churning in that huge tank, I’d started imagining what it would be like if I fell in. Still, the pasture was a wonderful place and I would play there all day long, breaking off only to get back to the dock by five o’clock. The ferry made just four round-trips a day, but the dock on the northern island was as lively as a market. They sold ice cream, popcorn, baked apples, candy…and ramune. Anything a kid could want. The sea would glow in the evening just as we were sailing back from the north, and as the sun dipped toward the horizon, it would seem so close you could reach out and grab it in your hand. Compared to the northern island, ours always seemed a little quiet and lonely, with the mountain shrouded in haze. I kept my ferry ticket in the back pocket of my pants, carefully folded to make sure I didn’t lose it, but it always ended up crumpled and crushed from the pony ride.”

  R talked on without a pause. It was wonderful to hear him, as though he were reading me a thrilling fairy tale or playing delightful music. From time to time I would raise my head to glance over at the three objects lined up on the bookshelf, but they seemed to be dozing—so very peacefully that it was almost impossible to believe that they were the source of all these stories. I rested my cheek once more on R’s chest.

  He told me he had once played the harmonica at a school concert when the conductor’s baton snapped in two and everyone burst out laughing, interrupting the performance. How his grandmother used to produce ramune from the pocket of her apron and feed them to him one after the other, until one day they made him sick. How his mother scolded her. How his grandmother had died from a disease that wastes away the muscles of the heart.

  Listening to stories about things that had disappeared usually tended to overexcite my nerves. But there wa
s nothing disagreeable about these stories. And though I wouldn’t have been able to recount much of what R told me, it didn’t bother me in the least. Much as I had done as a girl during those secret times with my mother in the basement studio, I was content now to simply listen innocently to everything he said—like a child with the hem of her skirt spread, waiting to receive God’s chocolate from heaven.

  The next Sunday, I decided to visit my mother’s cabin with the old man, since R had said she might have left more sculptures there that concealed secrets.

  I called the place a cabin, but it was really nothing more than a rough hut that she had used in the summer as a place to sculpt. No one had set foot there since her death, and I suspected it would be in ruins after the earthquake.

  The old man and I filled our backpacks with canteens of water and our lunch and left the house early in the morning. We took the train to the base of the mountain and then walked an hour along the road by the river, reaching the cabin just before noon.

  “This is terrible,” said the old man, resting his backpack on the snow and wiping his face with a towel he had tucked in his belt.

  “Worse than I’d imagined,” I added, sitting down on a rock by the river and taking a sip from my canteen.

  The cabin was barely recognizable as a building. It was difficult to tell where the door had been, and it looked as though the whole thing would come crashing down at the slightest touch. The roof was caved in from the weight of the snow, the chimney had broken off, and brightly colored mushrooms were growing from the moss that covered the walls.

  We decided to eat our lunch and rest for a while before setting to work. But not for too long. We didn’t want to get home late, since the Memory Police tended to take note of anyone lingering outdoors after dark.

  We pulled away the boards of what must have been the entrance and made our way inside. The floor was littered with nails and knives and chisels and carving tools and all kinds of sharp objects, and since our path was blocked by a fallen beam, we made our way cautiously, shining a flashlight as we went.

  “What’s that?” I called, my voice rising nearly to a shriek. I had spotted a small lump under the worktable—something that seemed different from the rest of the rubble around us, soft and damp, almost slimy, but with spiky bits sticking out here and there, a shape that was melting in on itself…and giving off a terrible stench. The old man directed the flashlight toward it.

  “I’m afraid something has died,” he said, his tone neutral.

  “But what?”

  “A cat, if I had to guess. It probably made its way in here to die.”

  On closer inspection we could see that the flesh on the head and body had almost completely dissolved, leaving just the bones. But the paws and ears were clearly those of a cat. We said a silent prayer for an animal we’d never met in life and set to work, trying to avoid looking at it.

  The sculptures were scattered about the room, but it was actually fairly easy to tell those that had been designed to conceal something inside. They were more abstract, having been fashioned from scraps of wood and stone arranged in such a way that it would be easy to extract what lay within. A number of them were already broken and their contents spilling out.

  We filled our backpacks with sculptures, and when they were full we used the suitcase we had brought along to carry more. There was no time to break open each piece to see what was inside, but we could tell the moment we took one in our hands that it contained something that had disappeared.

  We were finished in two hours. Two backpacks and a suitcase completely full. It occurred to us that we should bury the cat, but in the end we left it where it was, knowing that it would soon be interred under the snow and the crumbling cabin. When we reached the riverbank, I stopped, set down the suitcase, and turned to look back at a place I knew I would never visit again.

  “Can I carry your bag?” asked the old man.

  “No, I’m fine,” I told him, and we set off down the valley for the station.

  Since the express train was about to arrive, the waiting room was overflowing with travelers and their luggage—families returning from a day in the country, farmers bringing vegetables to the market in town—everyone seemed ill at ease, as though the station itself were filled with anxiety.

  “The train must be late,” I said, shifting the suitcase from one hand to the other.

  “No,” said the old man. “They’re checking the bags.”

  * * *

  . . .

  The Memory Police had just closed the ticket gate and were ordering the passengers to form two lines. Their green trucks were parked around the circular drive in front of the building. They had the station attendants remove the benches from the waiting room. The train had already pulled up to the platform, but there was no sign it was about to leave.

  I looked at the old man, my eyes asking him what we should do.

  “We have to stay calm,” he murmured under his breath, “and get to the back of the line.”

  Surrendering ourselves to the wave of people around us, we gradually retreated through the ranks, arriving at last about ten places from the end. Just in front of us was a farmer shouldering a bamboo basket stuffed with vegetables, canned goods, dried meat, cheese—a mouthwatering supply of food. Behind us were a prosperous-looking mother and daughter carrying suitcases.

  The line advanced bit by bit. The Memory Police, guns drawn, kept a careful eye on us as they patrolled the waiting room. It was difficult to see over the crowd, but it seemed that two of the officers were checking luggage and identification papers at the ticket gate.

  “They’ve been doing this a lot lately.”

  “But they can’t be finding much way out here in the country.”

  “I don’t know about that. I’ve heard rumors that people are leaving hiding places in town because they think it will be safer up here in the mountains. So the police are beginning to shift their activities as well. They apparently found a man in a cave the other day.”

  “But we’re the ones kept waiting. I wish they would hurry up.”

  The whispered conversations stopped, and the travelers fell silent whenever the Memory Police passed by.

  “They’re not interested in the luggage, just our papers,” murmured the old man as he bent over and pretended to adjust his belt. “Ours are in order, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

  And indeed, they seemed to be taking their time examining each person’s identification. They turned over the documents, held them up to the light, repeatedly compared photograph to person, and otherwise checked for fakes, while at the same time matching the identification numbers against their black list. By comparison, the luggage searches took only a moment and were limited to a quick glance inside the opened bags.

  Still, the contents of our backpacks and suitcase were not the usual assortment of underwear and sweaters, cookies and makeup, but a collection of objects that concealed things that had long ago vanished from memory, for which even we did not know the names, much less the functions. I tightened the shoulder straps on my pack and gripped the handle of the suitcase. After sitting for so long in the ruined cabin, the objects we had taken must have been shocked when we pulled them out into the world. I could almost sense their fear, coming through the bags.

  “Just leave this to me,” said the old man. “You don’t have to say a word.”

  I wondered how he was planning to explain three bags filled with odd sculptures. We had, of course, been careful to put the cracked ones deeper in the bags, but if one of the officers were to reach in to search or empty the contents completely, that would be the end of us. There was nowhere to run. My mouth was dry as dust, my tongue glued to the roof.

  Our turn drew steadily nearer. The whistle on the train sounded, and those remaining in the line grew even more impatient. The scheduled departure time had long since
passed, and dusk was deepening around us. The would-be passengers were annoyed to have their plans interrupted way out here in the middle of nowhere, but I found myself envying them. No matter how important the appointments they might be missing, it was certain that their lives didn’t depend on the outcome of the inspection that was now facing the old man and me.

  “Next.” The Memory Police said no more than was absolutely necessary, their faces expressionless. Once the inspection was finished, the passengers buckled their bags and pushed through the ticket gate onto the platform. Just three more people ahead of us. Just two. The old man and I huddled close together.

  “How much longer is this going to take? We’re already an hour late.”

  The man ahead of us with the overflowing basket of food had spoken up when his turn came, and suddenly the line came to an abrupt halt. The rest of us held our breath, wondering whether he was insane to be addressing the Memory Police that way.

  “Do you know who I am?” he continued. “I’m the guy who supplies your dining hall. I have orders to make my delivery to the Memory Police headquarters every Sunday by five o’clock. Here, take a look: my pass, issued by the police. So let’s get this train moving! Right about now, your colleagues back at headquarters will be starting to complain that there’s nothing for dinner. And I’m the one they’re going to blame.”

  He had said all this while holding the pass under the nose of one of the officers. Then, just as he finished, the young woman behind us pressed her handkerchief to her mouth, staggered a step, and collapsed.

  “Oh dear!” cried her mother. “She’s anemic, and her heart is weak. Someone help me, please!”

  The old man immediately passed his bag to me and gathered the girl in his arms. As he did, the people waiting behind us surged forward, curious to know what had happened, and the line turned into a crowd, while the farmer in the front continued his speech.