the housekeeper and the professor by yōko ogawa

Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Yōko Ogawa ( 小川洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. 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. 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. She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.Īnd every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.

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.

The housekeeper and the professor by yōko ogawa