yōko ogawa the housekeeper and the professor

All wrapped in the beautifully understated prose of Yoko Ogawa. It’s about overcoming isolation and opening up to possibility. It’s about to torn families coming together to form a new family built from the tragedies each has experienced. The Housekeeper and the Professor is about friendship and the bonds people form when they are open to receiving each other’s flaws as well as their gifts. Enter an under educated housekeeper devoted to her work and her nine year old son (an avid baseball fan) who shake the professor’s self constructed reality to reveal a fully fledged person. The only connection the professor can form with these people is through their numbers (birth date, age, height, shoe size, etc.) and finding the interplay those numbers have with the only world he understands, mathematics. Meeting new people for the professor and the person in question is a daunting experience that must be repeated every day. To this end, she hires a series of housekeepers to tend to the “professor’s” few needs and to keep his shack of a home from deteriorating any further. Isolated from the world, it’s left to his widowed sister-in-law to be his caretaker. Unable to form lasting relationships with anyone new, he’s stuck in the past that no longer exists. His only connection with the larger world and important events in his life is through the handwritten notes clipped to his worn out suits. His world is reduced to solving puzzles from mathematic journals. Read moreĪ gifted mathematician, after suffering a terrible accident is left with a memory that only last for 80 minutes. 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. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son.

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 every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.

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

Yoko Ogawa's 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.

Yōko ogawa the housekeeper and the professor