The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Description

The Housekeeper and the Professor (The Gift of Numbers) Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (translation)
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

aka The Gift of Numbers

Originally published in 2003 as 博士の愛した数式 (Hakase no ai shita sūshiki)

Winner of the Yomiuri Literature Prize

Winner of the 2004 Hon’ya Taishō (The Booksellers Prize)

Winner of the Sugaku Shuppan-Sho (from the Japanese Academy of Mathematics)

A Japan Foundation Selection

A film based on the novel was released on January 21, 2006. It was directed by Takashi Koizum

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 & the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange & 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 & poetic world to both the Housekeeper & her young son.

The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities — like the Housekeeper’s shoe size — & the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer & more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

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

°°°

Yōko Ogawa (小川 洋子), writer & novelist, was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, & lives in Ashiya. Initially, she wrote only as a hobby, & her husband didn’t realise she was a writer until her debut novel, The Breaking of the Butterfly, received a literary prize. Her novella Pregnancy Diary, written in brief intervals when her son was a toddler, won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature.