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"I suppose memories live here and there in the body... But they're invisible, aren't they? And no matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone, if no one pays attention to it. They leave no trace, no evidence that they ever existed."

The acceptance of one's mortality is perhaps one of the most profound moments in a person's life. From the first waves of existence our immediate impulse is wired for self-preservation. We want to live longer as soon as we taste life. That is why an infant would cry for the nourishment of its mother’s milk when it feels hunger. Then comes consciousness and our impulse is to desire experiences and gratification of the senses to no end. We build a shell around our being, pieced by memories of our interactions and relationships with people, objects, and concepts. We do all we can to preserve this shell. Until the shell is cracked, then damaged, and eventually broken. People have a hard time accepting this. Those around them suffer even more. It is called the last stage of grief; it should also be the last stage of life. A person who openly submits to the cessation of his existence will see those shells plucked piece by piece until eventually there is nothing more to pluck and what was built is gone. Grace manifests in the quiet fortitude of a person who is at peace with the idea that soon he or she will have each part, each memory erased, until all the traces of their existence vanish, expecting nothing more. Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police is a story about loss outlined in the slow process of human decay, told in a dystopian fable about people losing their understanding and memories of things one by one. It is cold, bare, and haunting.

There is a certain ghost-like quality in the simple prose of this work. We hear from the perspective of a name-less novelist who seems almost detached, resigned to the loss that is their everyday life. Then we are allowed to read from the novel she is working on. She is writing a novel about a typist who loses her voice and then everything else. Alternating between the writer and the character we suffer through loss, initially, in small doses. We are conditioned to this state until we have accepted it not as a stranger to be shunned, but a welcome friend to greet when it passes. It starts with a small object, and then it becomes something more significant like a living being, then freedom, a part of your senses, a loved one. They pile onto a heap of things both personal and valuable, all labeled as lost, until there is nothing left but that great heap. It’s like watching a small spark turning into a flame, no bigger than a hand, spreading until it has consumed a pile of books, and then an entire building.

This is a beautiful meditation on loss and self-acceptance. Given its natural course, the accumulation of loss in our existence becomes harder and harder to bear. We become more and more uncomfortable with life so fragmented by things gone. Our existence becomes a shadow filling the emptiness of those that have been. Until eventually loss itself becomes not the source of pain, but the final act of comfort.

Find people, moments, things you wouldn’t want to lose. Make memories you wouldn’t want to forget. And when all is said and done, all might be lost and forgotten. But you made forgetting and losing hard. That’s enough.

"No one can erase the stories."

All that’s left are the words that slowly drift away like wisps of smoke in a dark winter's night.