The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa

The housekeeper of this book's title is a never-married Japanese mother of a ten-year-old boy. She has just been assigned a new client and learns that she will be the tenth housekeeper the agency has sent to assist the professor, a brilliant mathematician. The previous women have, we assume, been unable to cope with the fact that, due to brain injury suffered in a car accident, the professor has only 80 minutes of short-term memory (or perhaps they are troubled by the moldy shoes he wears or the small notes pinned all over his clothing in an attempt to deal with the problems that having no short-term memory causes).

This housekeeper enjoys her work with the professor and is drawn into his love for numbers. The professor can find something interesting about any number or pair of numbers. For example, when they meet for the first time, `he asks her shoe size. When she tells him twenty-four centimeters, he replies "There's a sturdy number. It's the factorial of four." Her phone number, it turns out, is the total number of the primes between one and one hundred million. Soon, the housekeeper is visiting the library in a quest to understand more of the equations and concepts the professor has laid before her.

When the professor learns that the housekeeper has a son, he insists the son come to the professor's house after school. He and the son have a spontaneous affection cemented by their love of baseball, a treasure trove of numbers for those enamored with the mathematical. The housekeeper and her son (nicknamed Root because his head is as flat as the square root symbol) determine to take the professor to a baseball game, all the while hiding from him the fact that his favorite player has long since retired.

Even though the professor cannot remember the housekeeper and her son from day to day, a lovely familial feeling develops among the three, prompting the reader to reflect on the relationship between memory and love (not to mention the connections between mathematics and everything). I likely will not remember the math in the book more than 80 hours (in truth, 80 minutes is probably closer to the truth), but I'll remember the quiet beauty of both the story and the writing much longer.

Favorite passage:

Cheers and static drowned out the voice of the announcer. The smell of baking bread filled the room as we pictured the trail left by the pitcher's cleats on his walk out to the mound.

Of interest:

This book was recommended by Trish, a member of the Broomfield, UK, book group that Novel Conversations is twinning with. It was translated by Stephen Snyder, former University of Colorado faculty member.