Fiction Pick of the Week: The Housekeeper and the Professor

The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yoko Ogawa 2009 (Originally published in Japan in 2003. Translation by Stephen Snyder.)

How do you build a relationship, even one as straightforward as employer-employee, with someone who has almost no short-term memory? This is the challenge faced by the Housekeeper, a high school dropout and single mother, hired to cook and clean for the Professor, a former teacher of mathematics who can recall only the last 80 minutes since suffering a brain injury in 1975. While the Housekeeper and the Professor must start every day anew, they soon forge an unusual bond as he shares with them what he can remember from his pre-accident days: his love of numbers. He particularly enjoys tutoring the Housekeeper’s son as they discover a mutual love of baseball—one of the most statistically driven sports. It is difficult to describe the mesmerizing effect of this novel which is at once deceptively simple yet amazingly complex, touchingly familiar yet entirely unique. If those of us who despised the abstract mathematics of high school had the Professor as a teacher, we would have a much greater appreciation of the beauty, wonder and power of numbers as a metaphor for life and its relationships.