Yoko Ogawa

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born

in Okayama, Japan

March 30, 1962

gender

female

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Yoko Ogawa (alternate spelling Yôko Ogawa; Japanese: 小川洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya with her husband and son. 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, so...more Yoko Ogawa (alternate spelling Yôko Ogawa; Japanese: 小川洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya with her husband and son. 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). (The dockland setting and a significant subplot owe nothing to Ogawa's novella. Interestingly, in conversation with the audience after a showing of the film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, 2006, Diane Bertrand said that she was not sure that she understood the book.)

Kenzaburō Ōe has said, 'Yoko 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. (Hotel Iris, one of her longer works, is more explicit sexually than her other works and is also her most widely translated.)

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Yoko Ogawa's Books

Average rating: 3.84 · 11,823 ratings · 2,435 reviews · 60 distinct works · Similar authors

	The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (Translator) 3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 avg rating — 8,290 ratings — published 2003 — 31 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Diving Pool: Three Novellas by Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (Translation) 3.67 of 5 stars 3.67 avg rating — 983 ratings — published 1990 — 16 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (Translator) 3.32 of 5 stars 3.32 avg rating — 996 ratings — published 1996 — 19 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Revenge 3.91 of 5 stars 3.91 avg rating — 806 ratings — published 1998 — 19 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	L'annulaire 3.73 of 5 stars 3.73 avg rating — 123 ratings — published 1994 — 10 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Parfum de glace 3.65 of 5 stars 3.65 avg rating — 85 ratings — published 1998 — 6 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	غرفة مثالية لرجل مريض by Yoko Ogawa, بسام حجار (Translator) 3.57 of 5 stars 3.57 avg rating — 81 ratings — published 1989 — 4 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Le Musée Du Silence 3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 avg rating — 58 ratings — published 2000 — 5 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	La Petite pièce hexagonale 3.78 of 5 stars 3.78 avg rating — 45 ratings — published 1994 — 3 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	La marche de Mina 3.74 of 5 stars 3.74 avg rating — 53 ratings — published 2006 — 4 editions	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by Yoko Ogawa

“Still, being alone doesn't mean you have to be miserable. In that sense it's different from losing something. You've still got yourself, even if you lose everything else. You've got to have faith in yourself and not get down just because you're on your own.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

28 people liked it

“He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers. For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

tags: love

16 people liked it

“Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

tags: housekeeper, mathematics, ogawa, problem-solving, professor

14 people liked it

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What should we read for June 2011?

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

3 votes, 42.9%

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

2 votes, 28.6%

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

1 vote, 14.3%

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

1 vote, 14.3%

7 total votes

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