Yoko Ogawa; trans. Stephen Snyder
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder, is a quiet, charming novel about the unlikely friendship that develops between a housekeeper, her son, and a professor.
The novel opens with the housekeeper preparing to face her new assignment. She is hired to take care of a brilliant math professor with a short-term memory of only eighty minutes, a disability caused by a traumatic head injury. Each morning as she shows up at his doorstep, she has to remind him who she is and has to begin their relationship anew. But she is an astute housekeeper and gradually learns to accommodate. She assists him with his memory loss by helping him posts notes on his person to help him remember.
Although his short-term memory spans only eighty minutes, the professor’s brain retains knowledge of mathematics and the passion and exuberance he feels for it. His enthusiasm for the elegance of mathematic equations and his ability to draw connections and discern the beauty in numbers is contagious. Soon the housekeeper and her ten-year-old son are captivated by the professor’s prodigious knowledge and his extraordinary abilities to draw mathematical connections between the mundane and the spiritual. Their friendship is strengthened by a shared love for baseball.
The relationship is mutually beneficial. The professor instils in them an appreciation for numbers and for the ability of math to impose logic and order in an otherwise chaotic world. In turn, they adjust to his quirky mannerisms and disability with sensitivity and affection, taking care to shelter him from the harsh reality of his memory loss. The three form a strong bond that continues for many years until the professor’s death.
The novel is replete with equations, numbers, theorems, baseball, and baseball statistics. These will resonate with aficionados of math and baseball, but you don’t have to know about either to appreciate the beauty and simplicity of the novel since it is primarily a delightfully quiet and charming story about an unlikely friendship that blossoms into love.
The professor is kind and showers the housekeeper’s child with attention and concern. The child who has never known his real father finds in the professor a surrogate father. The housekeeper finds in the professor a gentle soul who shares a love for her child and who ignites her enthusiasm for the world of numbers. And the professor finds in the housekeeper and her son two people who nurture him and shield him from harm. A single mother, her child, plus a mathematics professor unite to form a loving family—a family the professor would no doubt be able to express in an elegant mathematic equation.
Highly recommended.