The Housekeeper and the Professor

On the Inner Flap

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 blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper’s shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family. 

My Thoughts

I stumbled across this book while perusing the shelves of my local library. Admittedly, it was the cover that attracted me, with its cherry blossoms and random mathematical symbols whimsically dancing in the air. I wanted to know more. Reading the inside flap, I became curious to see how the author would weave the relationship between the three main characters when one of them could only remember the last 80 minutes of his life. Ogawa succeeded -- I grew to care for the characters and shared their minor victories and frustrations. 

There are mathematical equations and proofs dotted throughout the book, and I caught myself following along with them and pausing to figure things out. It was vaguely reminiscent of the 'choose your own adventure books' in the sense that figuring out the problems added to understanding the story and I felt in charge of adding certain nuances to the characters' relationships. I thought it was quite eloquent of the author to use numbers to achieve character development and in a way that transcends the written word.

Another tool the author used to develop the plot and her characters was referencing professional baseball in Japan, such as game and player statistics. It was a common interest all three main characters shared, and was an obvious connection. Due to my significant lack of interest in franchised sports, however, I felt a little agitated with what I considered to be too many baseball references throughout the book. So, whenever baseball came into the story, I found myself drifting outside of the book and hoping the next non-baseball paragraph would come sooner rather than later. Perhaps some of the novel was lost on me in that regard, and that I may have missed something key in fully appreciating the novel. 

What piqued my interest considerably was a mere paragraph in the book that alluded to a past relationship between the Professor and his sister-in-law -- something you might miss if you blinked. I thought it was going to be a turning point in the story, but the author decided to leave it as a casual remark. I certainly would have preferred if the Ogawa had delved more into this relationship rather than all those references to the star player, Yutaka Enatsu, and his baseball team. But perhaps she decided that it was enough to give the reader a small taste that, in another life, there was more to the Professor than just his world of numbers -- some romance with a hint of scandal -- after all, the options are as endless as the reader's imagination, and can be exactly what the reader wants it to be. 

I can't remember the last time (if there ever was) I read a book where the characters didn't have names. Part of me was curious what their names could have been, but how much does naming characters really contribute to character and plot development? Labels such as 'housekeeper', 'professor', 'barber', 'doctor', 'old widow', etc., got the point across easily enough, and not attaching a name to these individuals did not detract from getting to know them better, but it was definitely noticeable that they were nameless. In fact, the only characters who are named are the non-fictional baseball players. With my previous paragraph in mind, I think an author can achieve a lot through deliberate exclusion. 

I would recommend reading The Housekeeper and the Professor. It's an interesting, easy read -- one definitely worth reading once, but not one I would feel the need to read again. I suggest borrowing it from a friend, or do as I did and borrow it from your library. 

Side Note
According to Wikipedia, there is a movie adaptation of the novel, called The Professor's Beloved Equation, telling the story from the son's point of view and touches on the relationship between the Professor and his sister-in law.