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The Housekeeper and the Professor

Yōko Ogawa,

Stephen Snyder (Translator)

3.94 · Rating details · 23,823 ratings · 4,006 reviews

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship bl ...more

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Paperback, 180 pages

Published February 3rd 2009 by Picador (first published August 2003)

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3.94 ·

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· 23,823 ratings · 4,006 reviews

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Mar 18, 2017 Brina rated it it was amazing

Shelves: baseball, fiction, japan, gift-exchange

Happy Cubs opening day! 2018 has not been the reading year I had planned on so far. Real life and the stress that goes with it have gotten in the way of being able to focus on reading. Hopefully that changes. In the meantime in honor of the Cubs first home game this year, I am reposting my favorite baseball book from last year, a lovely novella that I am fortunate did not fly under my radar.

The Housekeeper and the Professor was recommended to me by my Goodreads' friend Diane because she knows t Happy Cubs opening day! 2018 has not been the reading year I had planned on so far. Real life and the stress that goes with it have gotten in the way of being able to focus on reading. Hopefully that changes. In the meantime in honor of the Cubs first home game this year, I am reposting my favorite baseball book from last year, a lovely novella that I am fortunate did not fly under my radar.

The Housekeeper and the Professor was recommended to me by my Goodreads' friend Diane because she knows that I love baseball. This March, Japan is participating in the World Baseball Classic so I found this slim novel to be a timely read. Yoko Ogawa has been a leading Japanese novelist for twenty years. In this touching story, she creates a family out of a housekeeper, her ten year old son, and the math professor whose cottage they were asked to tend to.

The Professor is a math genius, but seventeen years prior to the events of this novel he suffered brain trauma in an accident. As a result his short term memory is only 80 minutes long, and he clips notes to his suit in order to remember important information. Fortunately, the math theorems for which he earned a PhD and many honors as well as his ability to teach them remain intact. Yet, despite this brilliant mind, he is unable to care for himself because of the memory loss and requires a full time Housekeeper to assist him at home.

The Housekeeper is a single mother. She is the first Housekeeper who stayed with the Professor for more than one day because she overlooked his 80 minute memory loop. Rather, she embraced learning abstract mathematical concepts such as amicable numbers, perfect numbers, and the professor's love for prime numbers. When he finds out that she is a working mother, he insists that she brings her son to work. What ensues is a touching relationship between the Professor and ten year old Root.

Ogawa is able to bridge the gap between the most unlikely of friends by writing about numbers as the universal language. The Professor says that G-D made numbers before people, and the proofs were always there waiting to be discovered. She inserts actual mathematical proofs rather than writing about them, which both speeds up the novel, and allows the Housekeeper to know the Professor on his level.

This gap is also bridged by Root and the Professor's shared love of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team. As a multigenerational fan of the same team, I have seen first hand how baseball is more than a game but a love shared by families. This is evident as the professor fixes his radio so that Root can listen to games, and together they follow the Tigers on their drive toward the pennant. Because baseball is a game of numbers, Ogawa includes statistics and probability in order to show that the Professor loves the game as much as children do.

Being a mother of a boy close in age to Root who loves both baseball and math as well as one who has seen older family members succumb to memory loss, I felt like I could relate to the characters in this story. I was moved by the relationship of the three characters in this slim novel, and enjoyed trying to solve the math proofs along with the housekeeper. Ogawa is a new author for me, and I thoroughly enjoyed this story that I recommend to anyone looking for a touching character driven novel to read. ...more

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Feb 07, 2017 BlackOxford rated it it was amazing

Shelves: japanese, philosophy-theology, favourites, science, mathematics

Life by the Numbers

Numbers are everywhere - Real, Natural, Imaginary, Perfect, Amicable, Abundant, Deficient, Triangular, Prime (including both Mersenne and Pernicious as well as Twins) to name a few. And they're all here in The Housekeeper and the Professor, which Ms. Ogawa wrote in 2007. The Professor is of mathematics and has amnesia; the housekeeper is devoted and has a son. This melange constitutes the cast of a charming story of mathematics and love, subjects with a connection that is less ...more

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Nov 11, 2010 Sue rated it it was amazing

Shelves: japan, literary-fiction, read-in-2012, favorites, plan-to-re-read

On originally reading a description of this novel I wondered if it was really for me. Did I want to read about a Professor with a memory span of 80 minutes and the Housekeeper who assists him? I'm so glad I decided to read it and I'm happy to have my own copy. This story of memory, math, building a pseudo-family where no relationship has existed before is full of love and compassion. The emotions are mostly expressed in mathematical theorems, cooking and random touch, but it is palpable througho ...more

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Jan 30, 2017 Marita rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Marita by: Ray

Shelves: japan-japanese, 2017, favourites-2017, fiction

“The Professor loved prime numbers more than anything in the world.”

"To me, they were just numbers.” says the new housekeeper.

“”What’s your shoe size?” This was the Professor’s first question, once I had announced myself as the new housekeeper. No bow, no greeting.”

The professor had been involved in a motor vehicle accident, and now his memory is only of the last eighty minutes. Every morning the housekeeper introduces herself. Every morning

”He would ask my shoe size or telephone number, o

...more

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Jan 23, 2018 Lori rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Amicable numbers – pair of keyrings Nerd Romance (https://mathsgear.co.uk/products/amic...)

Not that kind of love story, but a sad, sweet story about an unlikely friendship between a brilliant mathematician, his housekeeper and her son. There is love just no romance.

The Professor is 64 years old. He suffered a brain injury at age 47. He has an 80-minute retention for new memories ever since his accident. He covers his suit in notes to remember new information. He loves math, numbers, children an ...more

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Jan 15, 2018 PorshaJo rated it really liked it

Shelves: audio, challengereads, challengereads-2018, culture-japanese

A wonderful, heart-warming story about unlikely friendships....and math...and baseball! I decided to grab this one for my Japanese reading challenge for 2018 and it was the perfect story to begin reading. It's heavy into math, which I must say, I'm a bit rusty on. I was at one time fascinated by numbers, going to the highest level of math courses in college, and working for my college math professor. But then...I just lost interest in numbers (as along came computers! Nerd!)

The story is of the f ...more

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Feb 05, 2017 Agnieszka rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: japan, 2017, ebook, reviewed

The Housekeeper and the Professor is a charming and enjoyable novella about eponymous Professor of mathematics who due to accident years earlier suffers from peculiar form of amnesia and while he remembers everything from the past his current memory lasts only eighty minutes, and as a reminder of this fact he has fitting note pinned to his suit. In fact Professor has plenty notes on him that rustle when he walks. It also is a story about his housekeeper, young single mother and her son named b
The Housekeeper and the Professor is a charming and enjoyable novella about eponymous Professor of mathematics who due to accident years earlier suffers from peculiar form of amnesia and while he remembers everything from the past his current memory lasts only eighty minutes, and as a reminder of this fact he has fitting note pinned to his suit. In fact Professor has plenty notes on him that rustle when he walks. It also is a story about his housekeeper, young single mother and her son named by Professor, in honor of root sign since his head is flat, Root. And finally the story revolves about numbers, whole range of numbers. Prime, natural, amicable, perfect, triangular and so on.

Well, being myself mathematical dimwit I didn’t think reading about equations, proofs and Fermat Last Theorem could be so engaging. For Professor numbers are comforting and solving some mathematical puzzle leaves him peaceful and at ease. And these passages devoted to the beauty of mathematics I found especially captivating. In mathematics is order and logic that I admire and mystery and beauty that regretfully I not always can comprehend.

You could think that being limited to the world of numbers only the Professor is excluded from the outside world. Yes, in some way he is. He lives in unkempt cottage, his clothes remember better times and he barely leaves his refuge. But he almost immediately creates a bond with his housekeeper’s ten years old son. And reading about their relationship, the way he cares about the boy is such heart-warming even if every time Professor has to start his day looking at his clothes to find a proper note reminding him who the boy and his mother are.

Yōko Ogawa wrote this story with elegance and understanding, fortunately avoiding saccharine undertone that can be found in some novels concerning disabilities issue. We can see Professor in his best and worst moments. We see old man in shabby clothes who pays no attention to his dowdiness and hygienic matters. We see him thinking and pointing at the sky to indicate the evening star that is about to show. We perfectly understand his fear of crowded places and can comprehend the fact when he reduces baseball game to numbers and statistics or writes a formula to end an arguing. Because numbers always would give him sense of order and harmony with himself and the world.

3.5/5 ...more

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May 30, 2012 Cecily rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: miscellaneous-fiction, china-japan-asia, solitary-protagonist, ageing-and-old-age, family-parenting

An enjoyable Japanese novel that scatters numbers, and facts about the brain, though it's primarily about friendship. It feels light, but prompts profound questions.

The sit

The eponymous housekeeper is a young single mother (herself the only child of a single mother) with a ten-year-old son. She becomes daily housekeeper to a former maths professor whose head injury in 1975 means he only remembers the most recent 80 minutes, plus things before 1975, nearly 20 years before the story is set (~1992) ...more

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Apr 12, 2017 Margitte rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017-read, fiction, reviewed, japan

With only 192 pages, it is a breeze. A delightful pause. A little gem of fantasmagoric proportions. An ode to maths. And a Dennis The Menace- moment in nostalgia.

The Dennis The Menace-moment.(view spoiler) With only 192 pages, it is a breeze. A delightful pause. A little gem of fantasmagoric proportions. An ode to maths. And a Dennis The Menace- moment in nostalgia.

The Dennis The Menace-moment.(view spoiler)

Reading this book, about a housekeeper and her little son, and a brilliant mentally-disabled professor after a severe head injury, brought the joy of numbers back. Every eighty minutes his short term memory erased itself, but he still had his memories of elegant equations from the past. The housekeeper and her son had to introduce themselves each day all over again. The professor called her son 'Root', because, he said, the flat top of the boy's head reminded him of the square root sign. Very soon the professor managed to instill a love of maths in the little boy (rekindle it in me as well!), and brought the magic of this ancient old knowledge alive.

The professor believed that the very origins of the universe could be explained in the exact language of numbers. It was like copying truths from God's notebook.

A bond of friendship formed when they managed to get the old radio working again and baseball broadcasts could reverberate through the small garden cottage. He became a surrogate father to the boy child, while layers of silence were slowly lifted. It did not matter if they got the answers wrong to his math problems. He preferred their wild, desperate guesses to silence.

Curious equations created an unlikely family where one was desperately needed.

Written as a fictional memoir. It feels so real, so true. So very very good.

RECOMMENDED. ...more

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Aug 21, 2017 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read2017, location-japan, around-the-world, translated, women-in-translation

Everyone and their mother read this last year for Women in Translation month (August 2016), and I remember finding my own copy at the annual literacy book sale. I set it aside for WIT month this year and was happy to pull it back out.

The housekeeper is a single parent, trying to make enough to live on, and the professor is a mathematician with a failing memory. The story is about connection and care but also MATH and anyone who knows me knows I'm a sucker for math. The professor can't remember p ...more

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Jun 09, 2010 Petra Eggs rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, reviewed

This is a beautifully-written, elegant little book about an old man, a maths professor, his housekeeper and her young son. The professor's memory post-1975 is only 80 minutes long, so everything is fresh and new to him all the time, including the news his memory is only 80 minutes long. The housekeeper has her own problems but finds fulfillment in the relationship, ever renewed, between her son and the professor and her growing love for mathematics. It is a mark of the author's writing that the ...more

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Sep 08, 2013 Kelly rated it liked it

Shelves: 21st-century, fiction, examined-lives, identity-crisis, its-the-quiet-ones, owned

A highly polished, smooth, shining surface of a novel that was exquisitely crafted from start to finish. The voice was so understated and matter-of-fact that I would have had little trouble believing that this was an actual account of a real housekeeper remembering her experiences. There were very few authorial flourishes and all of them were appropriately put into the mouth of the strange, afflicted Professor, a math genius whose short-term memory only lasts 80 minutes.

A premise like that can b ...more

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Sep 22, 2018 Michael rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, mathematics, coming-of-age, japan, baseball, disabilities

This tale charms us with the friendship that develops between a young housekeeper and her 12-year old son with an elderly recluse and former mathematics professor. Though he can’t retain new memories beyond 80 minutes, his 50-plus years of skills developed as a mathematician prior to the accident and brain damage that disabled him are still accessible to him. These skills he creatively puts to use each day trying to figure out and live in whatever social world of people falls his way as if anew. This tale charms us with the friendship that develops between a young housekeeper and her 12-year old son with an elderly recluse and former mathematics professor. Though he can’t retain new memories beyond 80 minutes, his 50-plus years of skills developed as a mathematician prior to the accident and brain damage that disabled him are still accessible to him. These skills he creatively puts to use each day trying to figure out and live in whatever social world of people falls his way as if anew. The “Housekeeper” (the only name we have for our narrator) learns how to promote continuity with the self-absorbed and fragile octogenarian by pinning to his shirt to see each morning a drawing of herself and a square-root symbol for her son (who becomes “Root” because of his flat head). It felt brilliant how Ogawa’s three characters formed a fruitful virtual family despite all the challenges of the old man’s memory problems.

The Professor has outlived any friends and family he might have had, and his one limited family member is a daughter-in-law who provides his apartment and hires housekeepers told to handle all problems themselves. Thus, the Housekeeper understands how she is his only human connection, and her kind nature leads her open whatever doors to his heart can be opened. His main occupation during the day is solving math puzzles posed by certain journals, a task that can build each day on his own written proofs and series of equations from the day before. His use of math as a timeless way to query and grasp the world becomes quite a revelation to her. She even gets inspired enough to work on math puzzles herself during pauses in her day, driven by the sense of wonderful truths about reality are there to be discovered.

The reader needs no facility with math to appreciate the hold of mathematical thinking on the characters (i.e. as was true of “The Curious Case of the Dog in the Nighttime” and “The Beautiful Mind”). For example, The Professor likes to ask the Housekeeper what her birthday is or some other quantity question and then identify amazing mathematical properties of the number, such as it being a “Perfect Number” (one equal to the sum of its factors) or a special kind of Prime number (one that has no factors but one and itself). The Professor takes special pleasure in treating her son to tales of the wonders of numbers, such as the weird features of Imaginary numbers (one based on the square root of a negative number). The Housekeeper breaks the rules of her agency by bringing Root to her job each day after his school, as the pleasures of her son’s bond with the Professor clearly enhances the quality of both their lives. The fatherless boy gets beneficent wisdom from an adult stand-in and learns the empathetic ability to protect him from the pain of learning out of synch his memories are with the present world. For example, they share the common pleasures of a favorite baseball team’s successes, but Root makes up a story for why the Professor’s hero of the 50s is not in the games they share.

A read of this book provides some of the same rewards of cross-generational friendships and collisions of the serious and the comic that are common in the work of Fred Backman. On top of the fuzzy warmth of experiencing the breaking down of barriers between people, this novel adds an artful layer of mathematics played out as a language that can mediate the kind of human connections and framework for reality that all of us need to fully live in this lonely life.

As a sample of the frequent zest of math applied to life, here the Housekeeper is tending the Professor when he is sick and she is realizing how fragile he is:
I remembered something the Professor told me, something a mathematician with a difficult name once said: “Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it.” The Professor’s body had been consumed by the devil of mathematics.
...more

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Aug 10, 2012 Dem rated it liked it

3.5 Star

The Housekeeper + The Professor by Yoko Ogawa is a heart-warming story about a housekeeper, a professor and the housekeeper’s ten year old son but also and most importantly a story about what it means to live in the present, and about friendships, family and respect and a little Math thrown in for good measure.

"He is a brilliant maths professor who lives with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is a sensitive and astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him"

T ...more

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Sep 03, 2015 Ghazaleh rated it liked it · review of another edition

کتابی که نشر آموت منتشر کنه و کیهان بهمنی ترجمه کنه حتما باید خونده بشه!!
کتاب موضوع متفاوتی داره. فصل های اول خیلی کشش داره ولی از جایی به بعد روند داستان دیگه یکسان میشه.
نه از اون دسته کتاب هاییه که بشه گفت جالب نبودن نه از اون دسته ای که بگی فوق العاده بودن، به نظرم حداقل برای یه بار خوندن کتاب خوبیه. البته که بسته به سلیقه آدم ها نظرات متفاوته شاید برای کسی که به ریاضی علاقه مندتر از من باشه کتاب جالب تری باشه.

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Feb 15, 2010 Trish rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, character-driven

This is a quietly wonderful book. When I was reading it I really liked it. Now that some time has passed I still think of it, and any book that I still remember months after reading is a book that deserves 5 stars. Although there is some advanced math in the story the author doesn't expect the reader to understand all of it. The numbers and math are used more to show the magic of numbers and how math brings an unlikely group of people together to form meaningful relationships.
This is a characte ...more

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Feb 03, 2015 Teresa rated it really liked it

3.5

After our first full day visiting Japan in 2011, I saw a baseball game on TV (had to be a replay because it was December): the Yakult Swallows versus the Hanshin Tigers. I recognized Matt Murton of the Tigers who'd briefly played for the Chicago Cubs and the name of the 40-year-old Miyamoto. Two evenings later, in Nara, we got caught up in a small parade on the main street and as it ended, a young man straddling a bicycle caught up with us to ask if we were Americans and, next, if we knew Ame 3.5

After our first full day visiting Japan in 2011, I saw a baseball game on TV (had to be a replay because it was December): the Yakult Swallows versus the Hanshin Tigers. I recognized Matt Murton of the Tigers who'd briefly played for the Chicago Cubs and the name of the 40-year-old Miyamoto. Two evenings later, in Nara, we got caught up in a small parade on the main street and as it ended, a young man straddling a bicycle caught up with us to ask if we were Americans and, next, if we knew American baseball. When I asked if he knew American baseball, his response was "of course". (I soon understood his "of course" simply meant "yes".) His favorite Japanese team was the Hanshin Tigers, so I mentioned Murton, and he gave some other names of Americans playing in Japan. I mentioned Fukudome* (who was then playing for the Cubs) and he countered with Sammy Sosa! The young man walked with us to the hotel where we said good-bye, and he seemed reluctant to part.

I bring this up not only because in this book the Hanshin Tigers are the favorite team of the professor and the son of the housekeeper; but because baseball (along with mathematics) is the way the housekeeper and her son communicate with the professor. I don't speak Japanese and the young man's English was limited, yet we communicated -- and quite satisfactorily -- through the names of baseball players.

This book is very different from the other works of Ogawa that have been translated into English. Anyone reading this first and then the others might be in for a shock. And while I prefer her Revenge and The Diving Pool, her narratorial choice here (as usual) is intriguing. The housekeeper tells us nothing of how hard and lonely her own life must be, as if to point out how little she knows of the professor's feelings. She never questions the giving of friendship to a man who will have no memory of it eighty minutes later. The professor may live in a sort of bubble, but surely the housekeeper doesn't, though that is what she presents to us. Because of these choices, on the surface the story might seem mostly a sweet one (and it is, though it's never saccharine) but I can't help sense the sadness that lurks beneath.

* I googled Fukudome to see where he is playing now, and had to smile ... the Hanshin Tigers. ...more

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Aug 04, 2011 Connie rated it really liked it

Shelves: asia, japan, spring-2018, re-reads, mathematics

This is a lovely story where kindness turns unrelated people into a family. The Housekeeper is hired to cook and keep house for a Professor of mathematics who had a traumatic brain injury after a car accident. Although the Professor can remember events that happened before the TBI, this injury resulted in his short-term memory lasting only eighty minutes. It seems like they are meeting for the first time every day.

The Housekeeper and her ten year old son interact quite well with the professor s ...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Ashley rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Ashley by: Yulia

Shelves: general-fiction, favorites

I’m not sure on which page I fell in love with the wrinkled, snowy-haired Professor in his rumpled suit with the scrap-paper reminders pinned all over it (the most important one being the note that reads “My memory lasts only eighty minutes”). I just know that about 50 pages from the end of the story, I found myself digging in my heels, wanting to linger over every last word. The Housekeeper and the Professor is a gently written, beautiful musing on the nature of friendship and familial love. An I’m not sure on which page I fell in love with the wrinkled, snowy-haired Professor in his rumpled suit with the scrap-paper reminders pinned all over it (the most important one being the note that reads “My memory lasts only eighty minutes”). I just know that about 50 pages from the end of the story, I found myself digging in my heels, wanting to linger over every last word. The Housekeeper and the Professor is a gently written, beautiful musing on the nature of friendship and familial love. And it’s a peek into a brilliant mind—one that sees the entire visible world in terms of the mathematics that underpins it; one that effortlessly finds a connection between his new housekeeper’s birth date and the three-digit number etched on the back of his wristwatch; one that is most alive in the world of formulas and theorems. (Several formulas appear in the narrative, but as someone who is definitely not a math person, let me assure you that you don’t have to be into numbers to appreciate the story. And you can always let your eyes glaze over a bit on the math if you want—you won’t miss anything crucial.)

With all of the little torn bits of paper I used to mark my favorite passages, before long my copy of the book started to look something like the Professor’s suit. I’ll leave you with a handful of them:

“I uncovered propositions that existed out there long before we were born. It’s like copying truths from God’s notebook, though we aren’t always sure where to find this notebook or when it will be open.” … The Professor picked up a branch and began to scratch something in the dirt. ... The withered stick gracefully carved [his] thoughts into the dry earth, and before long the lacy pattern of the formula was spread out at our feet.
(Possibly I like this passage so much because it reminds me of another Man I love who once stooped to write mysteries in the dirt.)

He treated [my son] 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.

In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make even the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to earth.

And maybe the best description of a thunderstorm I’ve ever read:

The trees suddenly began to tremble and the sky grew dark. The line of hills on the horizon, faintly visible just a moment before, disappeared in the gloom. There was a rumbling in the distance.

“Thunder!” we said together, as the rain began to fall in enormous drops. The pounding on the roof echoed through the room. I stood up to close the windows, but the Professor stopped me.

“Leave them,” he said. “It feels good to have them open.”

The curtains billowed in the breeze, letting the rain pour in on our bare feet. It was cool and refreshing, just as the Professor had said. The sun had vanished and the only light in the garden was the faint glow from the lamp above the kitchen sink. Small birds flitted among the drooping, tangled branches of the trees, and then the rain obscured everything.

...more

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Feb 22, 2018 Megan rated it it was amazing

This was a delightful story about a single mother, who was also a professional housekeeper and her 10 year old son Root, befriending her new employer, a retired math professor, who due to a tragic accident is left with the ability to only retain information for eighty minutes, before it vanishes from his memory. This was such a uplifting book about the strong bond of friendship and how beautifully the housekeeper, the professor and Root all truly became better versions of themselves from this ne ...more

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Apr 29, 2009 Chrissie rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, japan, kirkus, text-checked, relationships

This book is truly original, not your normal run of the mill. I highly recommend it. What is it about? It is about friendship and the beauty of numbers and baseball. And more..... Where should I start? I will start with the numbers. This is sort of the easiest to expalin. This book made me see and feel the beauty of math, of the laws that govern numbers. The world is so complicated. We understand nothing. Everything is always changing, but then you learn of a mathematical formula that is constan This book is truly original, not your normal run of the mill. I highly recommend it. What is it about? It is about friendship and the beauty of numbers and baseball. And more..... Where should I start? I will start with the numbers. This is sort of the easiest to expalin. This book made me see and feel the beauty of math, of the laws that govern numbers. The world is so complicated. We understand nothing. Everything is always changing, but then you learn of a mathematical formula that is constant, that is always true, and suddenly there is an order to the messy world around us. The author goes even one step beyond this. Three people, of which two are completely normal like you and me, the housekeeper and her son, come to understand the magic of numbers through their contact with the Professor (of math). I wish I had had had a math teacher like te Professor! Did you know that zero is a concept thought up by an Indian mathematician. Before him the Greeks thought this concept didn't need a symbol. You get history, and then the author pulls the mathematical concept into the story so you understand the true consequence of the concept. What it means to you and me. Infinity, a line, zero, amicable numbers. Honestly, math is made beautiful. Occasionaly, I was too tired to follow the full development of a formula, but usually the author never pushed the theoretical underpinings too far. It is definitely worth reading the book just so that you will learn about math, but there is more!

There is baseball. And there is true friendship. And there is a look at how people come to love each other simply by doing things together. Caring for each other. All the blurbs about this book tell you that the housekeeper is taking care of an elderly man who can only remember what has happened during the last 80 minutes. He can also remember everything before 1975, before a car accident. What does this lack if remembrance really mean? It means that every day when she and her son come to his door he doesn't know who they are. It means that when you spend a wonderful afternoon together, it is gone tomorrow. So are the frightful disagreements that can destroy a day. Gone - they never happened! What does this say to the reader? What's the lesson to be learned? You get a beautiful picture of a frail old man, who has three suits - one for winter, one for summer and one for the spring and fall. That is what he wears. He has little pieces of paper pinned all over his suit to remind himeslf of things he must remember. Soon he is not a man dressed in a suit, but a man dressed in fragments of paper. The image is beautiful and clear and wonderful. Why? Bcause you fall in love with the guy! What develops for realationship between these three people is extraordinary. Do you see why I say this book is original? It is NOT melodramatic, it is quiet and beautiful. Heartwarming - definitely. Read it. It's only 180 pages. Take time to read chapter 10, of the eleven chapters in the book, slowly. Savour it. It is so beautiful.

12 pages in and I already love the characters, the housekeeper and the professor! Why is that? Perhaps b/c they are each true to their own selves. They are not what society wants them to be but merely who they were born to be. I cannot help but compare this with the poor souls of Remarkable Creatures. Although both Elizabeth and Mary also followed their inclinations, they spent all their time judging themselves by the moral standards of their times. The housekeeper and the professor are too busy being themselves. ...more

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Jul 08, 2018 Nada EL Shabrawi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: في-مكتبتي, مترجمات

رواية رقيقة وجميلة، حبيتها.

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Nov 23, 2018 Sofia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Πολύ γλυκό και τρυφερό μυθιστόρημα. Οι πολλές περιγραφές για το μπέιζμπολ ισως κουράσουν, αλλά δεν στέκεσαι σε αυτό.

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Apr 10, 2017 Suzy rated it really liked it

Shelves: friendship, memory-time, under-200pp, found-family, sports

This slim book hit all the right notes for me. I love stories about "found family", in this case a brilliant mathematician with an 80-minute memory from a decades-ago accident, a housekeeper hired to clean and cook for him and her 10-year-old son. I love stories about baseball and it was so fun getting a glimpse of what baseball in Japan is like, especially right at the start of our baseball season and right after we had played Japan in the World Baseball Classic. And baseball helped bring these ...more

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Aug 29, 2017 Tsung rated it it was amazing

It gets depressing when all you read is about tragedy, conflict, injustice, loss or regret. Then a feel good book comes along like a breath of fresh air. This is a charming, bittersweet story, and unexpectedly so. I was initially drawn in by the plot, the Professor, who after a traffic accident is unable to retain any new memories longer than 80 minutes. While this quirky device supports the entire story, it is not the star. There were numerous explanations of mathematical puzzles and facts and It gets depressing when all you read is about tragedy, conflict, injustice, loss or regret. Then a feel good book comes along like a breath of fresh air. This is a charming, bittersweet story, and unexpectedly so. I was initially drawn in by the plot, the Professor, who after a traffic accident is unable to retain any new memories longer than 80 minutes. While this quirky device supports the entire story, it is not the star. There were numerous explanations of mathematical puzzles and facts and figures from the baseball league. They were interesting but also not the main draw either. It was the beautiful relationship between the Professor, the Housekeeper and her son that took centre stage.

The Professor is erudite, eccentric and reclusive. Despite his handicaps, his caring and thoughtful nature still shines through. The Housekeeper is the epitome of devotion and dedication. She goes through remarkable lengths to keep the Professor’s world intact. Her son, given the nickname Root (after √), completes the equation. It is not openly expressed but you can sense the love between them which binds them together like a family.

It reminds me of another feel good book about failing memory and family love, Fredrik Backman’s “And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer”. I think “The Housekeeper and the Professor” resonates better. It is less caught up with the impairment, and builds more on the relationships.

So if you are in need of a story to lift your spirits, this is it.

Two interesting passages:

And yet, the room was filled by a kind of stillness. Not simply an absence of noise, but an accumulation of layers of silence, untouched by fallen hair or mold, silence that the Professor left behind as he wandered through the numbers, silence like a clear lake hidden in the depths of the forest.

But these tears were different, and no matter how I tried to wipe them away, they seemed to flow from a place I could never reach.

Update: The Professors condition is possible in real life. There's the curious case of Henry Molaison, who had a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy because of intractable seizures. He had curious memory problems, including an inability to form new long term memories. There's Clive Wearing whose hippocampus was affected by herpes encephalitis. His memory lasts only for 30 seconds. He can play the piano expertly but he cannot remember how he learnt the skill. ...more

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Jun 09, 2010 Fiona rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Fiona by: Laura

Shelves: books-i-own, 2010, original-language-japanese, setting-japan, favourites

How can I possibly put this book into my own words? I can’t begin to imagine I could capture or convey to any of you, how this book made me feel. It took me two days to read and I wish I could have taken more time to read it – but I simply couldn’t put it down. The pages seemed to turn themselves and I didn’t really feel like I was reading at all.

This book moved me. It is a small ripple that travels a long way across calm waters. It is nothing ground shaking, nothing that makes you tumble and di ...more

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Sep 09, 2017 Laysee rated it really liked it

Recommended to Laysee by: Tsung

Imagine going to work and having to introduce yourself afresh to your employer every day. Will it drive you crazy if the first question you had to answer at the door each day is “What’s your shoe size?” ?

A housekeeper, a single mother with a 10-year-old son, finds herself at the cottage of a 64-year-old Math professor who has had nine housekeepers before her. She expects a difficult client, but what she least expects is an affection that develops into a strong friendship.

The Professor suffered a Imagine going to work and having to introduce yourself afresh to your employer every day. Will it drive you crazy if the first question you had to answer at the door each day is “What’s your shoe size?” ?

A housekeeper, a single mother with a 10-year-old son, finds herself at the cottage of a 64-year-old Math professor who has had nine housekeepers before her. She expects a difficult client, but what she least expects is an affection that develops into a strong friendship.

The Professor suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident 17 years ago in 1975 that left his memory in shreds. He is unable to remember anything new and his memory lasts precisely 80 minutes. Mercifully, he lives in the world of numbers and that remains intact. I cannot fathom what it must be like to wake up each day and have to start all over again to make sense of the environment. Ogawa tells us that "…he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort." He does not remember the housekeeper from one day to the next. However, they can always discuss one thing without worry – Mathematics.

What I found loveliest is the gradual and steady flowering of the relationship between the Professor, the housekeeper, and her son, Root (a name fondly given by the Professor who delights in mussing the hair on the boy’s flat head). The Professor tells Root, "The square root sign is a generous symbol, it gives shelter to all the numbers." How wonderful!

The housekeeper goes beyond the call of duty to make the Professor’s daily living as stable as possible. She enlarges his world beyond the office where he does his "thinking". The Professor imparts to the housekeeper, Root, and me (the reluctant Math student) the Mathematical secrets hidden in “god’s notebook”. I learned about amicable numbers, perfect numbers, and Euler’s formula. To the Professor, "..explaining why a formula is beautiful is like trying to explain why stars are beautiful." He teaches this beauty with incredible patience, enthusiasm, and humility. I found delight in this Math palindrome – “I prefer pi”. I would have loved a Math teacher/professor like him. But what moved me most is the Professor’s genuine love for Root that is eloquently expressed despite his frailty and vulnerability.

Read The Housekeeper and the Professor. How immeasurably priceless it is that a person may lose his brain and memory and yet keep his heart and compassion. ...more

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Nov 12, 2017 Maria Xanthoudaki rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Το θέμα του βιβλίου είναι η ιδιόρρυθμη σχέση ενός καθηγητή μαθηματικών με προβλήματα μνήμης μετά από ένα τροχαίο ατύχημα με την οικιακή βοηθό του και το γιο της, μέσα από το μυστηριώδη κόσμο των μαθηματικών. Τρυφερό, ίσως λίγο γλυκανάλατο για τα γούστα μου, αλλά ενδιαφέρον ανάγνωσμα.
http://diavazontasvivlia.blogspot.gr/...

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Nov 22, 2014 Book Concierge rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audio, concierge, family, friendship, library, literary-fiction, poetry, strong-women, japan, book-club

Audiobook performed by Cassandra Campbell.
5***** and a ❤

A housekeeper is sent by her agency to the home of a problematic client. A blue star is stamped on the client’s card each time a housekeeper has to be replaced, and the Professor’s card already has nine stars. But she prides herself on her professionalism. The Professor lives in a small cottage next to a larger mansion occupied by his brother’s widow. A few years before he suffered a brain injury in an automobile accident and as a result hi Audiobook performed by Cassandra Campbell.
5***** and a ❤

A housekeeper is sent by her agency to the home of a problematic client. A blue star is stamped on the client’s card each time a housekeeper has to be replaced, and the Professor’s card already has nine stars. But she prides herself on her professionalism. The Professor lives in a small cottage next to a larger mansion occupied by his brother’s widow. A few years before he suffered a brain injury in an automobile accident and as a result his memory is limited to 80 minutes. His suit coat is covered in small notes to help him remember things he would otherwise forget. Each morning he asks the Housekeeper for her shoe size, her birth date and the age of her son, Root. Yet, despite having to introduce themselves anew each morning, they develop a unique friendship.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but what I got was a beautifully elegant gem of a novel. The slow way in which the Housekeeper, Root and the Professor get to know one another is framed by his lessons on the poetry of mathematics. And it IS poetic the way he explains it. His love of the subject and the elegance of perfect equations is evident, as is his love of teaching. As limited as his memory is, the Professor’s ability to find the beauty in numbers (and to share that sense of awe with his companions) seems without limit.

I liked how Ogawa used the Professor’s and Root’s love of baseball to frame their growing friendship. And I liked the sensitivity Root showed when he refrained from correcting the Professor’s assumption that the great Enatsu was still playing (rather than having actually retired more than a dozen years previously). Root taught the Professor to enjoy the game for the camaraderie and joy of watching the team and cheering them on, while the Professor taught Root the wonder of statistics and the beauty of the numbers involved. ”His joy had little to do with the difficulty of the problem. Simple or hard, the pleasure was in sharing it with us.”

I could not help but remember my father and his great love for and natural ability with math. He taught me so many little tricks when I was a child and made solving problems fun. I’m sure that is partly why I had such a positive emotional response to this book.

Cassandra Campbell does a fine job narrating the audio book. She has a gentle quality that is perfectly suited to this book. There is a scene where the Professor praises the way in which the boy has read aloud a homework problem: “You make a boring problem sound just like a poem.” That is a perfect description for Campbell’s performance; even when she is reading equations, she makes them sound like poetry.

UPDATE 12June16 - I re-read this in preparation for my F2F book club discussion. This time I read the text and find the writing just as poetically beautiful as when I listened to the audio. ...more

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Feb 05, 2015 Diane Barnes rated it it was amazing

The poetry of mathematics and the beauty of baseball are two phrases I would never have uttered before reading this book. A math equation makes my eyes glaze over, and I think baseball is the second most boring sport to watch. (Golf is #1). But like all great literature, this novel caused something inside me to shift and change.
The four characters in this tale are nameless, known only by their titles of Professor, Housekeeper, Sister-in-law, and Root, the housekeeper's 10 year old son, so nickna ...more

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About Yōko Ogawa

Yōko Ogawa

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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 ...more

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Trivia About The Housekeeper a...

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Quotes from The Housekeeper a...

“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.” — 88 likes

“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” — 38 likes

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