No worries ! and I must say I envy you to have a Japanese langage partner who you read and discuss books with 
Keeping track of what you’re reading and what you should be reading and avoiding spoilers sometimes feels like an olympic sport.
Btw, I think I’ve finally figured out how to juggle my own multiple books and book clubs, so if/when you want me to help/take over running the club, just say so !
Photo by Donna Elliot on Unsplash
Missing things: maps, hats, ferries, birds
The mystery deepens. One of the striking things about this chapter is the change of tone. We start where we left off in the previous chapter with an atmosphere of strangeness and a perplexing and growing list of things that have disappeared. (What is it that connects these missing things?). But we learn early in the chapter about the 秘密警察, and then we see them in action, and the oddness of the island shifts to a mood of oppression and threat. (It is interesting, I just don’t get the 懐かしい feeling that @nikoru describes)
The reader wonders in the first chapter - why do the islanders forget so quickly the things that vanish, why do they seem to no longer care? There is a magical nature to the disappearances.
(If something is erased from our memory and we no longer miss it, does its absence matter? There are connections here to ‘The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, and (for those who are interested, to fascinating philosophical and ethical questions about proposed therapeutic removal of memories: eg Can a blood pressure drug help ease the painful memory of an ex? - BBC News or The Ethics of Memory Modification: Personal Narratives, Relational Selves and Autonomy | Neuroethics))
But in this chapter it looks like the answer may be less magical, more sinister. We learn early in the chapter that people who grumble when their career vanishes overnight (eg because hats have been eradicated) are likely to attract the attention of the secret police. I had wondered why our narrator had been unable to ask her father about her mother’s secret drawer of contraband - whether this was part of the same magical process that prevents people from remembering. But perhaps the explanation is that she has internalised a deep social norm - “you must not speak about ‘forgotten’ things” - if you do, bad things will happen.
On the other hand (and maybe this is classic Ogawa - the nature of things is ambiguous, resists explanation), when the narrator wakes and senses that there is a new disappearance happening, she looks around her room to identify the ?missing object. But that would make no sense if the disappearances were all a result of collective action. When she sees the single bird flying above, she realises suddenly that all the related thoughts (words, feelings, memories) in her mind have disappeared. She tries to hold on to the image of this bird, but the mental image evaporates. If this is a mass delusion, it is very strange.
There are some interesting images in this chapter - the island floating in the middle of a great empty void, the birds all being released from their cages, flying initially around their owners, then being sucked up and disappearing into the expanse above. And the closing image of the narrator left in the empty room, in the wake of the departure of the secret police. That image reminded me of the feeling you get when you have moved out of a house/room, and the formerly alive, personal living space becomes an echoing, blank, impersonal emptiness.
形見
One of the interesting words that appears in this chapter is 形見. I found it interesting to look up the etymology of this word. Although there is an obvious English equivalent - memento - the English version doesn’t have quite the same connotation.
Memento comes from the imperative form of the Latin verb, to remember. It is thus an instruction or an invocation to remember something. (The phrase ‘memento mori’ - comes from Ancient Rome, and was a warning or instruction to “remember that you will die”).
But 形見 has a different feeling. On seeing the kanji, I had a presentiment, and this page confirms it -
形見とは、故人の思い入れが深かった品物を意味します。たとえば、故人が愛用していた日用品や、よく身に着けていたアクセサリーなどが形見にあたります。
形見の語源は、「遺された品を通じて『故人のかたち（姿）が見える』こと」。したがって、形見を受け取った人が、それを見ただけで故人を思い出させる品物が、形見にあたると考えてよいでしょう。
So the interesting implication for 密やかな結晶 is the way in which objects in the world are a key way to bring back to life people who have died. Quite literally - the shape of the vanished/deceased person appears before you when you hold/see again/open/smell these 形見
(I was reminded of the super-power that some characters have in some fantasy stories/novels of being able to touch objects and see crime scenes/past events in their mind’s eye)
There is a link to our other recent reading. In ミーナの行進, 朋子 has a collection of things, a library card, a photo, two matchboxes, that take her back to the 芦屋 family, to people who are no longer present.
So that is crucial for the implications of the disappearances in our current story. When objects disappear from the world, it is not just that people might have to change jobs, or struggle to find their way around the island. But also - the non-existence of these objects rob the islanders of a way to recall those who they have lost. A key part of the 寂しさ of the island life is the way in which they are losing not just things, but people who they loved.
I think perhaps this will be crucial to understanding the novel as allegory
Soundtrack suggestion
This track popped up on Spotify just as I finished this chapter, and it seems extremely fitting.
[Incidentally, I spotted on googling, that the screenplay adaption of 'The Memory Police was written by Charlie Kaufman, whose film ‘Eternal Sunshine’ I referenced in my chapter 2 post]
Interesting, so our unnamed narrator is a novelist.
(We haven’t had any names in the novel yet. Have they disappeared? Or is the namelessness part of the atmosphere of the story?)
I have wondered about how Ogawa often seems to be written into her own novels. Obviously, it is only natural for novelist to draw on their own experience. But it strikes me that there is something about her writing style that makes the reader wonder if a particular character is meant to be Ogawa or a version of her - in the fictional world.
So here we have three fascinating novels within the novel - the piano tuner’s missing lover, the ballerina with the missing leg living in a greenhouse with her botanist partner, and the man with a horrible sounding progressive genetic disintegration illness whose sister is his nurse/carer?
there are interesting echoes here of some of Ogawa’s other stories (the genetic illness sounds like the feared grapefruit toxicity in 妊娠カレンダー, and of course there was the extremely strange amputee in ドーミトリー
Interesting that our narrator continues to write each day (filling 5 pages of 原稿用紙) despite the desultory and dilapidated state of libraries and bookshops on the island. (She doesn’t say, but I wondered whether “reading” has been disappeared? Is that why her friend won’t read the narrator’s stories???)
And we meet the lovely old chap on the former ferry. I was a little surprised that the 秘密警察 hadn’t removed the old boat. But perhaps they are simply allowing nature to take its course.
(Another interesting point - the narrator sees some small birds near the old observatory. So obviously they haven’t been told that they are supposed to no longer exist on the island…)
He seems to be very keen on the company and conversation our narrator brings. I was impressed and surprised by his bringing out peaches on a tray of ice with mint leaves. 美味しそう
And we have another lovely image - of the two of them sharing and repeating the fragments of memories that they have of things that are gone (drawn out and enjoyed like the last remaining sweets, dissolving on one’s tongue). It seems as if they are deliberately flouting the rules of the island. Hope the police don’t find out…
Thanks a million for organizing this, @nikoru. I had previously dropped this book about ~100 pages in (in chapter 11), but maybe this will give me the motivation to get back into it and actually finish it…
Wow; I’m not reading and hadn’t planned to read the book, but your post on 形見 and their implications is super neat!
My thoughts are a little scattered so I will collect my ideas and put them in different categories.
Narrative, Novel as a Form
One thing that I am starting to think more about, which heavily affects how one might want to consider the events, characters, and themes of the story, is that there is no clear “logic of reality” to how things work. Similar to a David Lynch film, it feels easier to accept things as having a “dream logic”, in which things “make sense” insofar as what would normally be metaphorical can be taken as literally “real”. Some main elements which contribute to this so far are things like the logic of the island and daily life there, the logic of the memory police (if memories seem to vanish from the minds of those who hold them then why must some objects relating to those memories be seized?), and the logic of how forgetting (if that is the right term) seems to work.
What is Memory?
So far we have had an onslaught of even contradictory attitudes towards memory. To list some examples: As @domjcw illustrates well, we have keepsakes reminding us of the dead; We have the novels of the narrator, handling the idea of memory, and her will to write and record, to make physical what was once just an idea; We have the library, a place for books, which is rotting away and serves as a literal embodiment of the islanders attitude towards memory (if memories are not attended to then they will fade away just as those books have); We have the kindly man who refuses to read a novel to the end as then it would be over (believing some things are better left in anticipation and expectation, in one’s “memory of the future”, so to speak, than in one’s actual memory of the past where it would rot, fade, and could even be taken from you); We have the memory police removing objects (implying objects do indeed remind us of things); We have “forgotten” objects existing but without names or associated memories, just memories of having had memories.
Ideas, Language, Memory
Despite there being a lot of themes around memory going on here, I think we can start to put together a very light thesis about what 小川 is perhaps angling towards even at this stage. @domjcw mentioned the idea of Platonic forms. I could see this analysis working on a certain level, such as the fact that Plato’s Socrates frames knowledge as being like a remembering of forms and here we are in a world which perhaps asks what happens if we were to forget them. I think, however, that a more 20th century “post-linguistic turn” analysis might serve us better here. By this I mean that I feel that language is the key, not ideas.
The thing the narrator seems to lose is not the ideas (memories) themselves but the words by which to describe them. For example, it is the names of the birds she forgets, not the experience of observing them nor the memories of doing so with her father. In a similar way, the name of the ferry is the thing that is forgotten, not the idea of what a ferry is or its purpose and so on. Or so it currently seems to be that this is how things “work”. In this sense, I am tempted to say that something like the late-Heideggerian concept of language as “the house of being” would better fit the way that memory is presented here. That is to say that naming, pointing things out in contrast to other things and thus delineating them in the world, is the thing that bestows ontological significance upon them (makes them “exist”). The narrator does not seem to lose the “idea” or “shadow on the cave wall” of what a bird or ferry is but, instead, they lose the ability to give these things their own concrete reality as things in the world, to meaningfully point them out via language.
Of course, we are still early on and, as per the “dream logic” I mentioned above, I could well see this analysis falling apart a little later.
I think you are right that Ogawa’s fictional worlds often seem to have their own internal logic - and resist explanation in literal ways. That is very akin to a dream - or to poetry - or to allegory. I’ll come back to the last possibility, but one way of interpreting her writing here is as a way of exploring some ideas or phenomena in elliptical ways.
(Incidentally, I came across an onomatopoeia this week (not in the book I think) that has some resonance with the nature of Ogawa’s writing - あやふやな vague, ambiguous
Language and ideas are connected. One of the Orwellian allusions that I made in the first chapter, was the way that if you eradicate something from the language, you thereby remove the ability (or make much more difficult) to talk about, even to think about that concept or idea.
(To link to Plato, removal of a concept from the common language is perhaps to remove that concept from the world of forms. As you note, this is a contemporary ‘constructed’ view about ideas - different from Plato’s own description of an ethereal realm containing perfect versions of things, and existing independent of the imperfect real world)
Gee, Ogawa sure likes her lonely protagonists. How old do we think this person is? Not many hints yet. I also realized that I was assuming the protagonist is female, but I can’t recall if we’ve gotten a name or any other details yet.
I was really worried that the islanders were going to massacre a bunch of birds! I’m glad that it didn’t go that way. It seems that the expulsion of 消滅した物 is less about destruction, and more about letting go.
I am wondering how this is supposed to work with non-man-made things, like the birds. Do the birds also get a sense in their hearts that they don’t belong on the island any more, and so they leave and don’t come back? How is the island going to avoid an ecological disaster like the one that followed the near-extermination of sparrows during the Four Pests Campaign?
And while I’m wondering, I wonder how the protagonist has come to a point where they can recall all of these things and the names for them, even as they relate that in this moment, they could feel that the meaning of the word 鳥 had been lost.
At some point I realized that too, and I wondered why, but then I remembered that she was described as “daughter” in the first chapter. So there’s that 
Oops, I also meant to comment –
This is great stuff! I like this close reading!
@nikoru Aha! Nice, thank you for that.
Thank you for the offer! I must say the weekly posts are very easy for me as I have a generator script that does 99% of the work for me, so I’m happy to continue posting them. What I’m not so good at is making the club engaging for everybody 
So if you have any ideas along these lines (like e.g. domjcw does with the pictures) please feel free!
Welcome to Week 3!
| Week | Start Date | Chapter | Page Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 3 | Oct 18 | Chapter 4+5 | 30 |
Mark your participation status by voting in this poll.
(Please feel free to update your status whenever you like!)
If the last chapter highlighted the political implications of illicit memories, the scene here makes them completely unambiguous. The 記憶狩り scene felt as if it could well have been taken from nazi era Germany, with the rounded up ‘rememberers’ disappearing in the back of a truck to an unknown location, wrapped up in layers of clothing, and bearing hastily packed suitcases. (Did I understand correctly that the narrator assumes that her mother has been killed by the secret police?).
I was struck particularly, by all the passers-by freezing and standing motionless while the traffic lights change from green to red back to green again, and the secret police engage in their roundup.
I thought it was interesting and moving that those who are collected seem to have no features in common except
森の奥に取り残された沼のように静かな瞳で、遠くを見つめているだけだった。その瞳の中に、わたしたちの知らないたくさんの記憶を、彼らは隠し持っているのだ。
It is intriguing that the inability to forget seems to have a genetic marker. (There is an irony here, in that those who lose their memories are the ‘normal’ ones, while those who are not afflicted by the curious collective amnesia are deemed as abnormal, deviant and dangerous. A good memory is a ‘disability’ on the island! That raises an interesting idea or theme about what is deemed normal, and what we deem as disease.)
I was a bit worried about our narrator chatting to her editor in the lobby of the publishing house. Is this conversation safe? She seems to trust the editor - and he does seem to share her worries about the memory hunting (even volunteering information about the ‘memory underground’ and secret safe houses). But could this be overheard? Or could he be secretly one of the secret police??
For those who haven’t read the book before. Where do you think the narrator’s story within the story is going to go?
I have read the book before and have a vague memory of it. So here is a guaranteed spoiler free suggestion (this definitely isn’t what happens. But if you don’t even want to know negative predictions skip this)
The main character continues her search for ways to restore her voice. She and her lover develop their own form of sign language and eventually give up attempts to restore her voice . The boyfriend finds that he doesn’t like speaking anymore and the two of them retreat from the speaking world. They find other people who have voluntarily or involuntarily stopped speaking and form a silent community.
(Since this doesn’t seem very 危うい, it could probably be discounted even if I didn’t know that it was wrong.
Actually, as I was writing this I remembered that Ogawa’s latest novel サイレントシンガー has I think a plot line maybe related to this. I wonder if she wrote that story based on an idea that she rejected for this story within the story??)
Incidentally, a question for us to think about as we read on. If the outer story has a particular allegorical meaning, what does the story within it signify?
We learn early on in this chapter the answer to one of my questions in the previous chapter (about the narrator’s mother).
Some questions
Is there any significance that we learn the first character name this chapter? (いぬい)
I could work out the meaning of this phrase. Any clues?
The strange noise
静かにことを運んだ方が安全だと直感はしていたのだが、ノックの音がいつまでも辛抱強く控えめだったので、余計にあせってしまった。
And, when talking about the 呼び出し状
報酬は今の3倍になる
Three times what?
It took me ages to work out what the strange back door looking out on to the river might be
Then I remembered the film “River” set in Kibune, (anyone seen it?). The back of the houses face the river, and one of the old hotels has a lower level that has a door out to a small concrete platform. There may even have been a small rickety bridge.
We have the first direct reference to 密やかな
I thought the reference to the silent tears of 乾’s wife was very moving.
(I thought at first that the family were asking to be hidden in the basement room. Anyone else think that?)
I was confused for a while by
猫のみぞれ
I thought this was some weird idiomatic phrase before I realised that was presumably a name…
So she heard the knocking and figured out it comes from the basement, but she put the key away and stored it in a very safe place, and it made a lot of 雑音 to find it (her rummaging around in the drawer for the can with the keys, rummaging around in the can to find the right key). So she thought that 静かにことを運んだ方が安全だ it would have been better to do all this searching very quietly but ノックの音がいつまでも[…]だったので、[…]あせってしまった。the continuous knocking spurred her on. (Does that answer your question?)
So they get this letter that tells them they should come work at this other place, and the letter promises a lot of merits to them, for example 報酬 (salary) will be 今の3倍 i.e. three times more than at their current job.
(Which means that people are not snatched away straight away, but they get a friendly invite to come to this very nice place with this very nice work… )
By the way, if any of you is like Mina’s mom whose hobby is finding typos, you will enjoy this book There is one in chapter 5, for example (at least in the digital version I’m reading) 
Ohhh…
Thanks!!
I had not been able to work out the nature of the offer. I thought that their house, salary, car etc were being confiscated. Makes much more sense now!!
Does anyone know if there was a historical parallel for this? I find it hard to imagine the nazis offering (or even pretending to offer) Jewish people or dissidents money etc if they moved to a “research facility”
Didn’t spot the typo… hint??
It’s in the sentence after the one you quoted 
mmm, I think you’ll have to explain it…
