48 pages • 1 hour read
Yoko OgawaThe Memory Police
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 22-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary
A few days after the quake, the town struggles to recover in the cold and austerity. The narrator thinks she sees Professor Inui’s son’s gloves through a small gap in the canvas of a Memory Police truck.
Somewhat unsettled—physically and emotionally unhomed—by the earthquake, the old man moves in with the narrator. He completes repairs around the house but doesn’t have anyone check on his wounds. The narrator, the old man, and R discover that some of the abstract sculptures her mother made were broken in the quake, and there are objects hidden inside. These are objects that have disappeared, so the old man and the narrator are unsure how to handle them. R identifies them as a ferry ticket—“the same ferry the old man worked on” (212)—candy, and a harmonica; he encourages the narrator to share anything she can think of related to them, trying to wake “up [the narrator’s] sleeping soul” (213).
She shares a memory of her mother showing her the ticket from the secret drawers. R plays some songs on the harmonica, and she remembers organ lessons from her childhood. The narrator also attempts to play some songs on the harmonica, and they eat some of the hard lemon candy. Later, they lay in bed, and R shares memories about the objects that the narrator compares to her mother’s stories.
Chapter 23 Summary
On a subsequent Sunday, the old man and the narrator visit her mother’s cabin, which is a train ride and hour-long walk away, closer to the mountains and further down the river. This former sculpture studio is nearly ruined, and they search the debris. There is a dead cat among the broken sculptures, and they recover many of her mother’s pieces. The ones with hidden objects are “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” (221), and some have already revealed their secrets. They collect as many partially broken sculptures as they can fit in their backpacks and a suitcase and then return to the train station.
The Memory Police are at the station, doing checks of all the passengers’ bags. The old man and the narrator get in the back of the line and overhear conversations about the police finding people who can remember hiding out in mountain caves. She is nervous about their bags full of illicit materials, only partially hidden in art, thinking: “After sitting for so long in the ruined cabin, the objects must have been shocked when we pulled them out into the world. I could almost sense their fear, coming through the bags” (224).
Before they reach the search point, another passenger complains about the wait, demanding to be allowed through to deliver his food to the Memory Police HQ. An anemic woman faints. The old man helps with the young woman, and everyone is waived through without bag searches. When the narrator and the old man get back to her house, he struggles to eat.
Chapter 24 Summary
The old man seems to have recovered at the beginning of the chapter. While they don’t tell R about the search at the train station, they do break open the statues, geode-like, and bring him the objects inside. They, again, are unsure of how to handle the objects. R is excited, but the narrator and old man can’t come up with memories for him. The protagonist voices her fears: “What if everything on the island disappears?” R replies, “Even if the whole island disappears, this room will still be here” (232).
They fall into a consistent rhythm for a few weeks: The old man takes care of R while the protagonist improves at her typing job. The old man must also take care of a plumbing problem to avoid detection of the secret room. Don the dog falls ill, and they are wary of taking him to the vet, but the vet does not inquire into Don’s origins (he belonged to the neighborhood couple taken by the Memory Police), and Don is soon on the mend.
Another “small event” is the old man cutting R’s hair in the secret room. Shortly after this, the narrator finds the old man out by the library ruins while walking Don. They discuss the scarcity of food, the old man’s feelings about leaving the boat after leaving his old job, and fears about hiding R, such as the potential for secret rooms, or storage rooms, to disappear. She shares some of the candy from the Inuis’ statue stash with the old man. At the chapter’s end, the narrator states that this is the last time she sees him alive.
Chapters 22-24 Analysis
The role of art in this section is highlighted by personification: Statues feel “shocked” and emote “fear” to the narrator. Her mother’s artwork hiding objects is a mirror of how her novel hides ideas. Both forms of art take on more abstract qualities, from her mother’s forms of “scraps of wood and stone” (221) to the novelist losing her sense of narrative when novels disappear and her omissions of names and specific locations (this occurs in Ogawa’s novel as well as her unnamed protagonist’s manuscript).
Many memories are discussed in terms of sensory perceptions; this section focuses on music and aural memory. The evocative quality of songs played on a harmonica allows the narrator to access memories about learning to play music. However, other, non-musical objects are unable to spark memories for the narrator and the old man—they have an especially hard time with muscle memory, specifically how to hold objects.
The death of the old man and his recovery are both suggested paths in this section, and the former proves to be the true outcome. After his head injuries in the earthquake, the old man struggles with fine motor tasks, like skewering a pickle at the end of Chapter 23, but the narrator insists that the old man recovers and is “his energetic self once again” (228) at the beginning of Chapter 24. At the end of that chapter, she says, “That was the last time I saw him alive” (239). His narrative trajectory—towards death, then towards recovery—seems clear, but the (recovery) misdirection is revealed to be just that in the span of a chapter.
