The Housekeeper and the Professor

by Yōko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (Translator)

A brilliant maths Professor, due to a head injury, lives with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. An astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, is hired to care for him. Each morning, they're reintroduced. Despite his memory loss, the Professor's mind is filled with past mathematical equations. He creates clever maths riddles based on her personal details, revealing a poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her son. With each new equation, a mysterious affection and deep bond forms between them, transcending memory.

186 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Yōko Ogawa (小川 洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored „An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics“ with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.

A film in French, "L'Annulaire“ (The Ringfinger), directed by Diane Bertrand, starring Olga Kurylenko and Marc Barbé, was released in France in June 2005 and subsequently made the rounds of the international film festivals; the film, some of which is filmed in the Hamburg docks, is based in part on Ogawa's "Kusuriyubi no hyōhon“ (薬指の標本), translated into French as "L'Annulaire“ (by Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle who has translated numerous works by Ogawa, as well as works by Akira Yoshimura and by Ranpo Edogawa, into French).

Kenzaburō Ōe has said, 'Yōko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating.' The subtlety in part lies in the fact that Ogawa's characters often seem not to know why they are doing what they are doing. She works by accumulation of detail, a technique that is perhaps more successful in her shorter works; the slow pace of development in the longer works requires something of a deus ex machina to end them. The reader is presented with an acute description of what the protagonists, mostly but not always female, observe and feel and their somewhat alienated self-observations, some of which is a reflection of Japanese society and especially women's roles within in it. The tone of her works varies, across the works and sometimes within the longer works, from the surreal, through the grotesque and the--sometimes grotesquely--humorous, to the psychologically ambiguous and even disturbing.

Reviews

[Emi Yoshida · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in 1992 Tokyo, this story is about three quiet people and the power and beauty of math. And baseball too. If the housekeeper or her 10-yr old son or the professor were named, I missed it. Perhaps the professor was either Yutaka Taniyama or Goro Shimura, but the housekeeping narrator only referred to her son using the nickname the professor gave him, "Root" (because his hair style reminded him of the square root sign).

I wanted to know what the professor's relationship with his sister-in-law was about, or why he was the way he was about children, and there was no explanation so I took away a star. But the power and beauty of math and baseball were written about so compellingly even I was affected, and I'm no fan of either!

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had mixed feelings about this book at first because the story didn’t always pull me in evenly, but the way Ogawa writes about the quiet beauty of mathematics and the rhythms of baseball is genuinely compelling. Those sections are so graceful and absorbing that they elevated the whole experience for me. In the end, I liked the book more than I expected, carried along by its gentle celebration of patterns, memory, and connection.

[Mehdi · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a few words:

Touching, kind of relatable, human, nice to read, not perfect but still engaging.

[julia ☾⋆:⋆*･ﾟ · Rating 2 out of 5]

ihan sulonen mutta eihän tossa mitään tapahtunu

[Katie W. · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Judi Brewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!