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The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (view source)
Revision as of 14:59, 25 August 2020
, 14:59, 25 August 2020no edit summary
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I never really got on with maths at school. Or sport. So a book that seems to deal with both baseball and mathematics ought to fly to the bottom of my 'to read' pile. However, this slim little Japanese novel slipped into my hands and into my heart as soon as I saw it. The premise is very simple - a young housekeeper is assigned to a job working for an elderly, brain -damaged professor of mathematics. He has only eighty minutes of short-term memory, so he doesn't remember her from one day to the next, but his memory pre-1975 remains intact and somehow he continues to function, living through his obsession with numbers. Each morning he greets her at the door asking for her birth date and her telephone number. He finds puzzles and equations in everything, including shoe sizes and baseball, and the housekeeper becomes fascinated as she and her son also begin to see the beauty and the poetry in numbers.
Nothing very much happens in this story. The housekeeper settles into the professor's life, finding ways to cope with his memory problems. The professor already has his own coping mechanisms - he has paper notes clipped all over his suit with scribbled reminders on them, the most important one being 'My memory lasts only eighty minutes' - so he slowly begins to add paper notes to his suit to help him 'remember' her, and her son whom he nicknames Root because his head is flat like the symbol for square root. They find ways to reach out to each other through numbers, puzzles and riddles, and Root and the Professor discover a shared love of the same baseball team, although the Professor remembers them as they were in 1975, the time of his accident, and so Root does his best to shield the Professor from daily upsets upon realising that everything has changed since then. There are small moments of drama between the three of them, but they are all fairly domestic.
I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to The Bookbag.
Further reading suggestion: If you're looking for something else Japanese then you might want to try [[Black God by Dall-Young Lim|this manga story]] or for something similar in style try [[The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro]]. If you are interested in number then we can recommend [[Professor Stewart's Hoard of Mathematical Treasures by Ian Stewart]]. You might like to try [[Villain by Shuichi Yoshida]], although we found the style a little hard to come to terms with but we're glad we persevered.
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