In a recent bookshop trip, I sought out more Yöko Ogawa, after enjoying The Memory Police earlier this year. The Housekeeper and the Professor novel is not speculative fiction, but has an emphasis on the role of memory and how it shapes our lives and relationships. The story is about found family and how connections can be built and become important based on compassion and love.
SPOILER: The housekeeper is assigned to care for the professor, a mathematician who had an accident several years earlier that affected his memory. He is not able to build new memories, and his short-term memory lasts just eighty minutes. Each day, the housekeeper has to re-introduce herself and rebuild his trust and their relationship. The professor keeps notes pinned to his clothes that remind him of important information, such as who the housekeeper is. When the housekeeper brings her son to visit one day, an additional bond is started that becomes important for all three of them.
Supporting their human connections are two things: math and baseball. The professor is a genius mathematician, seeing patterns in everyday information and using those to teach and communicate math principles to the housekeeper and her son (who the professor names “Root” due to his flattish head that reminds him of the symbol for square root √). He delights in finding rare connections between numbers, and sharing his knowledge with others. When Root starts talking about baseball, they find another connection around the history of the game and the players, and the mathematical beauty within the game – the perfection of the diamond and field, the statistics of the players’ performance, the history and grace of the sport. Over the year that the three know each other, they each develop love and connection beyond the hard facts of math and of the professor’s disability. Their found family brings love and connection to people who would otherwise be alone and lonely. SPOILER ENDS.
Narrated by the housekeeper, the story has a fable-like quality, not least because none of the characters are named but are known instead by their role – professor, housekeeper, son, widow, sister-in-law. Other people are named – the various baseball players, other famous mathematicians – but the closest we get to names for the characters is the son’s nickname and a single initial, written on the back of an old photo of someone important to the professor’s past.
The concepts and philosophy of mathematics are woven into the story like a mathematical proof. The professor believes absolutely in the power of math to explain the universe, and the ineluctable ways that math appears in and even directs our lives. He is also an eloquent believer in the beauty of mathematics and the elegance of the proofs that he spends so much time with: “The truly correct proof is one that strikes a harmonious balance between strength and flexibility. There are plenty of proofs that are technically correct but are messy and inelegant or counterintuitive. But it’s not something you can put into words – explaining why a formula is beautiful is like trying to explain why the stars are beautiful.” Perhaps writing about math is like dancing about architecture.
The translation is excellent, reading very well in English with no sense that anything is missing. There was one minor snag: in one instance, the housekeeper notices that the sun has gone down, but just a few paragraphs later comments on the patterns the bright sunlight makes through the leaves. This may have been a translation issue, and other than distracting in the moment was not indicative of the overall quality of the story. Engaging, creative, and sad, this fable of family and connection was delightful.
Fate: This will go to a fellow reader to enjoy.
8 – female author
13 – set somewhere I’ve never been
21 – translation
rclr 