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The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel
The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel
The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel
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The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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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.

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 the Professor. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and 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 and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. 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.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 3, 2009
ISBN9781429952507
The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel
Author

Yoko Ogawa

Yoko Ogawa is the author of The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, and Hotel Iris. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award. Her novel The Housekeeper and the Professor has been adapted into a film, The Professor’s Beloved Equation. She lives in Ashiya, Japan, with her husband and son.

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Reviews for The Housekeeper and the Professor

Rating: 4.305 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    After receiving this book from the EArly Reviewers program I accidentally buried it and forgot to read it for a couple of years. I finally read it in one sitting last night. It's a sweet little story about a woman (the housekeeper), her son, and the memory deficient man (the professor) who she takes care of. I believe this is the only novel I've ever read with multiple math equations in it, so consider yourself warned.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Story of housekeeper and her son who go to work for an ex maths professor with a memory of only 80 minutes. Nicely written but found it somewhat slow moving and got lost in the mathematics at times.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am a mathematician so this influences my reaction to the book. first it has a mathematical idea in it. an honest real one. It presents the idea (how to add the integers from 1 to 100) completely, not merely pointing at it. it does this beautifully. Beyond the mathematics, the book is lovely. I think it is an effort to describe pure affection between humans.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A gifted mathematician, after suffering a terrible accident is left with a memory that only last for 80 minutes. His world is reduced to solving puzzles from mathematic journals. His only connection with the larger world and important events in his life is through the handwritten notes clipped to his worn out suits. Unable to form lasting relationships with anyone new, he’s stuck in the past that no longer exists. Isolated from the world, it’s left to his widowed sister-in-law to be his caretaker. 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. Meeting new people for the professor and the person in question is a daunting experience that must be repeated every day. 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. 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 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. It’s about to torn families coming together to form a new family built from the tragedies each has experienced. It’s about overcoming isolation and opening up to possibility. All wrapped in the beautifully understated prose of Yoko Ogawa.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Although I have never been a math person, this book made me wish that I understood the language of math better -- it certainly made me recognize that there is beauty to it, even if I have trouble appreciating it. This book about the relationship between a professor with short term memory problems, his housekeeper, and her son, is short (less than 200 pages) and a quick read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent read. The Professor taught mathematics at university but had a car accident that left him with a short-term memory of 80 minutes. He could remember the past but not the present. He has gone through a variety of housekeepers. One is hired and she stays. When the professor finds out she has a son, he has her bring the boy with her. A relationship is forged between them.I enjoyed how the housekeeper learns math so that she can understand what the professor is talking about. She learns that the math has a larger range on life and through it she learns to understand the professor. Her son and the professor connect over homework and baseball. I liked how the math, baseball, and life converged around the three of them. Even after the job ends, the housekeeper keeps involved in the professor's life as did her son. This is a book that stays with you after you close the pages. Unfortunately, I have to return it to the library.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a gently, lyrics story that deals with memory, family, and what makes a good life. With only an 80 minute window of memory, the Professor is stuck in a loop of uncertainty. He clings to his numbers, his beautiful mathematics, for security. The Housekeeper, a woman whose life is closed and colorless, learns from him about a wider place for the soul, and his relationship with her son opens the world for both the Professor and the boy. The math, woven like a scarlet thread through the story, adds an interesting tone to the narrative. While I enjoyed this book, it didn’t strike me as deep as others, or perhaps, as I expected. It is a good story: gentle, pleasing, peaceful. It’s an excellent read for a quiet rainy day, with a cup of tea at your side. But I did not find the magic of the narrative that others described. Worth reading, even so.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Elegant, serene, and spare novel about how kindness and accommodation make a family out of three lonely people in modern Japan. Ogawa puts words on a page with nary a misstep as naturally as walkers put one foot in front of the other. This reader felt only a sense of regret when I closed the book and left the peace, humanity, and grace that I'd shared living beside the Housekeeper, the Professor, and 10-year-old Root.Ogawa seamlessly melds number theory, relationships, and baseball into a story of encompassing love that shelters a math genius left with only 80 minutes of short term memory, his tireless and generous housekeeper, and her Japan Tigers-loving son. In assured straight-forward prose, the author soon has three characters with seemingly nothing in common discovering that their lives mesh. Each of them have gifts of understanding and compassion, of pupil and teacher, of caregiver and recipient that make them stronger individually and as a "family." Together they embody the beauty of triangular numbers.After all, Fermat's Theorem, in part, says that every positive integer is the sum of at most three triangular numbers. And at least, they are arranged most positively in this novel.Ogawa is a gem of a writer and I look forward to reading more of her fiction.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Translated from Japanese. Beautiful, gentle, thought provoking. A single mom meets a gentleman with short term memory issues thru her work as a housekeeper. He is a mathematician and relates to the world thru numbers. He has a fondness for children and her ten year old son soon comes to work with her after school. Mutual respect and responsibility help forge strong bonds despite the memory time loop restrictions. Adventures and misadventures and a lifelong friendship develop.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I thought this book was an elegant gem of a read. The touching story of the relationship between a housekeeper, a professor whose short-term memory lasts only 80 minutes, and the housekeeper's son. The relationship is both unique, simple, and profound. The interweaving of mathematical theory and relationship was deceptively simple. I think Ogawa has created a theorem for both eternal connection and divine order. I smiled the entire time I was reading it. Just lovely!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoyed the simplistic style of this book as well as the warm voice in which it was written. I also was quite pleased that actual equations and number examples were used for the math. Some of the passages about the beauty of math and numbers I found quite stirring. I was disapointed in the predictability of the novel and felt that the second half did not live up to my expectations after reading the first half. All in all, its a lovely soft soothing book about the nature of family, the building of affection and the elegance of our lives, loves, and world when viewed through the lense of numbers.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My choice of reading The Housekeeper and the Professor by Japanese author Yoko Ogawa immediately after reading a Murakami novel was neither deliberate nor intended. How I ended up owning the book is a story unto itself. I just happened to be listening to a review on NPR of Ogawa’s short story collection, Revenge, which sounded intriguing enough that I added it to my birthday list, which is always composed more of books than any other item. My daughter dutifully bought that for me, but my wife, while shopping with my list, came upon The Housekeeper and the Professor at Barnes & Noble and flipped it over to read the plug by Junot Diaz, author of The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, whom she knows to be one of my favorite writers. I recently met Junot at a lecture and book signing for his collection of short stories wrapped around a common theme, This is How You Lose Her, shortly before he was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant. Junot Diaz calls it “. . . one of the most beautiful novels.” So she bought it, I read it and I have to say I have to concur with Junot – and it is more than simply beautiful.The Housekeeper and the Professor is not the kind of novel that I would think I would typically enjoy. In fact, at first glance I would probably characterize it as a “chick book,” not only because the protagonist is female, but because the themes of love and loyalty and children seem very much to rise up out of that literary milieu. But my first glance would assume too much and fail to give the novel the justice it deserves as it tends neatly but quietly with a multiplicity of deeper themes. The eponymous housekeeper is a young single mother whose latest assignment happens to be at the residence of an elderly, brilliant professor of mathematics who suffered a head injury some years back that has left him with the inability to remember anything that occurs more than eighty minutes before, while leaving fully intact the memories he made prior to the accident. While the novel ostensibly revolves around the interactions between the housekeeper, the professor, and her young son whom the professor nicknames “root” because of his flat head, the central character is really mathematics – the beauty of mathematics as it defines the universe and the riddles it often implies. The housekeeper, like myself, has little background in mathematics and is at first baffled by much of it, but over the course of the book she becomes nearly obsessed with its ubiquity and her abilities in this regard increase while her wisdom grows on so many fronts. I still haven’t fully forgiven the brilliant physicist Roger Penrose for succumbing to “mathematical Platonism,” as revealed in Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist, but after reading The Housekeeper and the Professor I think I can better understand the nature of the seduction. While certainly not unaware of the power of mathematics to define our universe, prior to reading this novel I never before detected a beauty in its nature and scope. Ogawa’s slim, seemingly simple yet masterful novel has rewarded this reader with a true sense of awe not only for mathematics but for the essence of how people fit themselves into a greater reality.I cannot recommend this novel highly enough. For everyone. Read it. Today.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What a delightful story!The narrator is a young single mother who is a housekeeper through an agency. When the agency sends her to the latest house she is apprehensive because there are nine blue stars on the card meaning there were nine housekeepers before her. What she finds is an old man in a two-room cottage. He is dressed in an old suit covered with notes. The most telling one states "My memory lasts only eighty minutes."Every day she has to introduce herself to him by pointing out the drawing he made of her on one of the notes on his sleeve. She starts bringing her 10-year old son with her because the professor could not stand to think of him home alone. He nicknames the boy Root because his flat head reminds the man of the square root symbol.As time passes, their unusual relationship grows and her total ignorance of more than basic math is turned into an appreciation due to his deep love for the study. The reader is also given a new way to view an otherwise mundane subject for most of us. Even those of us without an interest in baseball can see how it can be so much more than just a game to its fans.Brief and spare, this book packs more beauty and love than books twice its size.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    this is a book that allows you to be. that is all. its not necessarily powerful or exhilirating or thrilling. no bad guys, no mystery, no cliffhangers. just a story about people, as japanese stories tend to be. however, it is delightful, somber, thoughtful and wonderful. i loved it for just what it is...a story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    There are already so many reviews, so let me just add that I enjoyed this story. It made me think about the nature of relationships, family and friendship. The Professor's short-term memory lasts only 80 minutes, yet he forms a strong bond with Root and the Housekeeper. In this way, the author is saying that love and family transcend the solely physical realm.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What a beautiful story! A housekeeper and her ten-year-old son care for and befriend a former mathematics professor whose memory was damaged in a car accident. Although the professor’s memory lasted no longer than eighty minutes, he pinned notes to his suit to remind him of things, especially who the housekeeper and Root were.Some of the actual math used in this story was a bit over my head, but I didn’t let that throw me. Instead, I sank myself into the warm friendship that ensued between the Professor, the housekeeper, and her son even though the Professor had to begin this process anew every eighty minutes. I found this story very calming except for those times in which I was afraid that something might change the status quo of these three people, each so important to the other two.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Cute story about the relationship between a retired math professor, his housekeeper, and her son, and the love of baseball and mathematics. A quick read, very enjoyable.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Told from the point of view of the unnamed housekeeper, The Housekeeper and the Professor is a beautiful yet complex tale about an unlikely relationship. She is a single mother to a ten year old boy, cleaning the house of a once-brilliant professor. He is a mathematician who suffered a traumatic head injury that has left him with a memory that lasts only 80 minutes at a time. It's an unusual predicament. The housekeeper must reintroduce herself to the professor every day she comes to cook and clean for the man. If she is at his tiny bungalow more than 80 minutes she must reintroduce herself in the same day. To try to compensate for his lack of memory, the professor has pinned notes about his life to help him cope. Included in his notes are details about the housekeeper and her son who the professor calls, "Root." Despite the obvious obstacles the professor and the housekeeper develop a beautiful friendship. At the "root" of their relationship is ten year old Root, baseball, and the undying love for a left-handed pitcher.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A book about a math professor and japan would seem to be right up my alley, but I frankly did not get this book at all. The story is basically about three people who all like each other and get along very well. That's it. No tension, no psychological complexity... the math and the baseball add some pages to the book, but were treated in an extremely superficial way. I have no idea how this book got the blurbs it did. Sure, japanese literature is known for "simplicity", but usually that means exquisite spareness of prose, not conceptual banality.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I hate baseball, a game full of statistics and numbers. I hate math. But how could I possibly not love this writing and this book about love but not a love story?

    "...The pages and pages of complex, impenetrable calculations might have contained the secrets of the universe, copied out of God's notebook.
    In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to earth."


    "He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers. For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world"

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    When I read the blurb for this book, I ummed and ahhed about whether to read it. My mother has a form of dementia, and the feelings I have about the slow loss of her made me wonder whether reading a story about a man whose memory is frozen in time was such a good idea. It did make me sad. It is wonderfully well written. I'm glad I read it though. The characters exist in a bubble of their own, its surface shape defined by the Professor's 80 minute memory. When they are together in their bubble, everything is fine. When the outside world presses on its surface, threatening to break in, Ogawa gets the sense of tension across very well. On finishing it, I experienced a sense of loss such as I have rarely felt. In between life and work, it actually only took me a day to read. It's a short book, but very full.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I liked this very much--the relationships were understatedly expressed, and beautiful. My mother recommended this book to me, and I recommended it to my older daughter. After reading the part where the characters discuss perfect numbers, my daughter started fiddling around with perfect numbers and found all sorts of other patterns--the lace of the universe, as the author describes it, showing through.

    In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that even the faintest light would shine though it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breee. You wan tdesperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask it to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language, to make even the tiniest fragment of our own, to bring it back to earth.

    Just typing the quote brings a lump to my throat, the way I always get when I think of something truly wonderful, profound, eternal.

    At one point the professor writes out Euler's formula, and the housekeeper gradually learns about it. She says,

    Using a profoundly unnatural concept, [Euler:] had discovered the natural connection between numbers that seemed completely unrelated ... A number that cycled on forever and another fague figure that never revealed its true nature now traced a short and elegant trajectory to a single point. Though there was no circle in evidence, pi had descended from somewhere to join hands with
    e. There they rested, slumped against each other, and it only remained for a human being to add 1, and the world suddenly changed. Everything resolved into nothing, zero.

    Euler's formula shown like a shooting star in the night sky, or like a line of poetry carved on the wall of a dark cave.


    Beautiful book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The professor for whom the housekeeper works has a memory that lasts only eighty minutes. Every day when she arrives for work, it is as if he is meeting her for the first time. Yet, somehow they manage to develop a friendship, based largely on the professor's kindness to the housekeeper's son and his eagerness to share mathematical precepts with both the housekeeper and the son. A delightful read.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    After reading and loving Ogawa's other two books that have been translated into English ("Hotel Iris" and "The Diving Pool"), I was very disappointed by "The Housekeeper and the Professor". What I appreciated so much about those other works was how deftly Ogawa was able to juxtapose beautiful, sparse, and poetic prose with dark and often unsettling undertones. This book, on the other hand, just came across as overly sentimental to me, almost like a sappy movie. I also did not enjoy the many discussions of the "beauty" of mathematics, which I found exaggerated and amateurish. I kept on reading the book because I really expected Ogawa to throw in some really unexpected, sinister turn to the plot, but no, the whole thing went on in its subdued, melodramatic tone.I can see how other people might enjoy this book, but for me, it failed to deliver on all the points that drew me to Ogawa in the first place.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Considering that the book is about two things that really do not thrill me, namely baseball and math, I liked it well enough. What is it with the Japanese and baseball anyway? The professor in this book is a huge fan of Japanese baseball, from the 70s, as he doesn’t remember anything beyond those years, and so are the housekeeper and her son and half of Japan, or so it seems. Baseball is the most popular sport in Japan according to many sources I checked. By an interesting coincidence, Murakami decided to become a writer during a baseball match, incidentally also sometime in the 70s. Anyway, the characters are interesting. The professor lost his memory many years ago in a car accident, and cannot remember anything for longer than 80 minutes. That makes it for an interesting job for the housekeeper whom he greets everyday as if he had not seen her before. Yet, the housekeeper manages to befriend the professor, and he and she, and the housekeeper’s son make an interesting and warm trio. There is a lot of math on top of it, since the professor is the professor of math, and some telling snippets of life in Japan. Overall, it’s a nice book, perfect for an adolescent and good for any other age.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Yoko Ogawa's book presents an interesting premise: how do you maintain a relationship with someone whose memory only last 80 minutes? Every time the "housekeeper" returns to the "professor's" house, she has to reintroduce herself. Fortunately the professor keeps notes clipped to his clothes to remind him of his memory problem and to explain who the housekeeper is. Since the professor, a former teacher of mathematics, lives almost entirely in the world of numbers, this becomes the basis of their relationship as he begins to teach her, and later her son, the interesting relationship that exists between numbers.The professor is the only character that becomes fully developed in this novel, while the housekeeper (the person narrating the story), her son, and the professor's sister-in-law are only lightly drawn in. Sometimes the book seems to be a "sugar-coated pill" to make the math lessons go down less painfully and other times it seems to be a history lesson on Japanese baseball - another passion of the professor as well as the housekeeper's son. But, in between, the glue that holds everything together is the tenuous relationship built up between the characters, which also holds its own lesson on the importance of relationship.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I am not sure I completely understood all the symbolism in this book. However, the story was so compelling that I read it in one setting. Great book for discussion!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A little book with a very sugary approach to mathematics.It probably won't be of much interest to mathematicians but it does give an insight, in the way many other books do, into the way in which mathematicians view their world. I cannot tell if it is the translation or the original Japanese but it seems to be written in a very "Western" way. How the characters speak, what they eat, their interests etc. There are a few glimpses of Japanese character but few and far between.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A housekeeper and her son tend to an aging mathematician who, because of a car accident, can only remember things before 1975, and the last 80 minutes of the present. Heartfelt, pure, and often as elegant as the mathematical “glimpses of God’s notebook” that the Professor gives us. Lots of feeling in this one, and some baseball as well.Quotes:On knowledge:“Among the many things that made the Professor an excellent teacher was the fact that he wasn’t afraid to say ‘we don’t know.’ For the Professor, there was no shame in admitting you didn’t have the answer, it was a necessary step towards the truth. It was as important to teach us about the unknown or the unknowable as it was to teach us what had already been safely proven.”On math:“The professor reached out to complete the long equation. The numbers unfolded in a simple, straight line, polished and clean. The subtle formula for the Artin conjecture and the plain line of factors for the number 28 blended seamlessly, surrounding us where we sat on the bench. The figures became stitches in the elaborate pattern woven in the dirt. I sat utterly still, afraid I might accidentally erase part of the design. It seemed as though the secret of the universe had miraculously appeared right here at our feet, as though God’s notebook had opened under our bench.”“In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make even the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to earth.”
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was such a sweet, lovely book. Very restrained... the language is simple, so the narrator's voice (a housekeeper) rings true. There's a little bit of A Beautiful Mind-like intersection of mathematics and a mental disturbance, but it's dealt with so quietly and beautifully that the whole set-up of the book, despite being unusual enough that it would probably be unbelievable in another context, seems almost natural. I felt like I relaxed into this story, and enjoyed every minute of it.

Book preview

The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yoko Ogawa

1

We called him the Professor. And he called my son Root, because, he said, the flat top of his head reminded him of the square root sign.

There’s a fine brain in there, the Professor said, mussing my son’s hair. Root, who wore a cap to avoid being teased by his friends, gave a wary shrug. With this one little sign we can come to know an infinite range of numbers, even those we can’t see. He traced the symbol in the thick layer of dust on his desk.

• • • •

Of all the countless things my son and I learned from the Professor, the meaning of the square root was among the most important. No doubt he would have been bothered by my use of the word countless—too sloppy, for he believed that the very origins of the universe could be explained in the exact language of numbers—but I don’t know how else to put it. He taught us about enormous prime numbers with more than a hundred thousand places, and the largest number of all, which was used in mathematical proofs and was in the Guinness Book of Records, and about the idea of something beyond infinity. As interesting as all this was, it could never match the experience of simply spending time with the Professor. I remember when he taught us about the spell cast by placing numbers under this square root sign. It was a rainy evening in early April. My son’s schoolbag lay abandoned on the rug. The light in the Professor’s study was dim. Outside the window, the blossoms on the apricot tree were heavy with rain.

The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the correct miscalculation, for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers. This gave us confidence even when our best efforts came to nothing.

Then what happens if you take the square root of negative one? he asked.

So you’d need to get –1 by multiplying a number by itself? Root asked. He had just learned fractions at school, and it had taken a half-hour lecture from the Professor to convince him that numbers less than zero even existed, so this was quite a leap. We tried picturing the square root of negative one in our heads: . The square root of 100 is 10; the square root of 16 is 4; the square root of 1 is 1. So the square root of –1 is . . .

He didn’t press us. On the contrary, he fondly studied our expressions as we mulled over the problem.

There is no such number, I said at last, sounding rather tentative.

Yes, there is, he said, pointing at his chest. It’s in here. It’s the most discreet sort of number, so it never comes out where it can be seen. But it’s here. We fell silent for a moment, trying to picture the square root of minus one in some distant, unknown place. The only sound was the rain falling outside the window. My son ran his hand over his head, as if to confirm the shape of the square root symbol.

But the Professor didn’t always insist on being the teacher. He had enormous respect for matters about which he had no knowledge, and he was as humble in such cases as the square root of negative one itself. Whenever he needed my help, he would interrupt me in the most polite way. Even the simplest request—that I help him set the timer on the toaster, for example—always began with I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but . . . Once I’d set the dial, he would sit peering in as the toast browned. He was as fascinated by the toast as he was by the mathematical proofs we did together, as if the truth of the toaster were no different from that of the Pythagorean theorem.

• • • •

It was March of 1992 when the Akebono Housekeeping Agency first sent me to work for the Professor. At the time, I was the youngest woman registered with the agency, which served a small city on the Inland Sea, although I already had more than ten years of experience. I managed to get along with all sorts of employers, and even when I cleaned for the most difficult clients, the ones no other housekeeper would touch, I never complained. I prided myself on being a true professional.

In the Professor’s case, it only took a glance at his client card to know that he might be trouble. A blue star was stamped on the back of the card each time a housekeeper had to be replaced, and there were already nine stars on the Professor’s card, a record during my years with the agency.

When I went for my interview, I was greeted by a slender, elegant old woman with dyed brown hair swept up in a bun. She wore a knit dress and walked with a cane.

You will be taking care of my brother-in-law, she said. I tried to imagine why she would be responsible for her husband’s brother. None of the others have lasted long, she continued. Which has been a terrible inconvenience for me and for my brother-in-law. We have to start again every time a new housekeeper comes. . . . The job isn’t complicated. You would come Monday through Friday at 11:00 A.M., fix him lunch, clean the house, do the shopping, make dinner, and leave at 7:00 P.M. That’s the extent of it.

There was something hesitant about the way she said the words brother-in-law. Her tone was polite enough, but her left hand nervously fingered her cane. Her eyes avoided mine, but occasionally I caught her casting a wary glance in my direction.

The details are in the contract I signed with the agency. I’m simply looking for someone who can help him live a normal life, like anyone else.

Is your brother-in-law here? I asked. She pointed with the cane to a cottage at the back of the garden behind the house. A red slate roof rose above a neatly pruned hedge of scarlet hawthorn.

I must ask you not to come and go between the main house and the cottage. Your job is to care for my brother-in-law, and the cottage has a separate entrance on the north side of the property. I would prefer that you resolve any difficulties without consulting me. That’s the one rule I ask you to respect. She gave a little tap with her cane.

I was used to absurd demands from my employers—that I wear a different color ribbon in my hair every day; that the water for tea be precisely 165 degrees; that I recite a little prayer every evening when Venus rose in the night sky—so the old woman’s request struck me as relatively straightforward.

Could I meet your brother-in-law now? I asked.

That won’t be necessary. She refused so flatly that I thought I had offended her. If you met him today, he wouldn’t remember you tomorrow.

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

He has difficulties with his memory, she said. He’s not senile; his brain works well, but about seventeen years ago he hit his head in an automobile accident. Since then, he has been unable to remember anything new. His memory stops in 1975. He can remember a theorem he developed thirty years ago, but he has no idea what he ate for dinner last night. In the simplest terms, it’s as if he has a single, eighty-minute videotape inside his head, and when he records anything new, he has to record over the existing memories. His memory lasts precisely eighty minutes—no more and no less. Perhaps because she had repeated this explanation so many times in the past, the old woman ran through it without pause, and with almost no sign of emotion.

How exactly does a man live with only eighty minutes of memory? I had cared for ailing clients on more than one occasion in the past, but none of that experience would be useful here. I could just picture a tenth blue star on the Professor’s card.

From the main house, the cottage appeared deserted. An old-fashioned garden door was set into the hawthorn hedge, but it was secured by a rusty lock that was covered in bird droppings.

Well then, I’ll expect you to start on Monday, the old woman said, putting an end to the conversation. And that’s how I came to work for the Professor.

Compared to the impressive main house, the cottage was modest to the point of being shabby: a small bungalow that seemed to have been built hastily. Trees and shrubs had grown wild around it, and the doorway was deep in shadows. When I tried the doorbell on Monday, it seemed to be broken.

What’s your shoe size?

This was the Professor’s first question, once I had announced myself as the new housekeeper. No bow, no greeting. If there is one ironclad rule in my profession, it’s that you always give the employer what he wants; and so I told him.

Twenty-four centimeters.

There’s a sturdy number, he said. It’s the factorial of four. He folded his arms, closed his eyes, and was silent for a moment.

What’s a ‘factorial’? I asked at last. I felt I should try to find out a bit more, since it seemed to be connected to his interest in my shoe size.

The product of all the natural numbers from one to four is twenty-four, he said, without opening his eyes. What’s your telephone number?

He nodded, as if deeply impressed. That’s the total number of primes between one and one hundred million.

It wasn’t immediately clear to me why my phone number was so interesting, but his enthusiasm seemed genuine. And he wasn’t showing off; he struck me as straightforward and modest. It nearly convinced me that there was something special about my phone number, and that I was somehow special for having it.

Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.

Every morning, during the entire time I worked for the Professor, we repeated this numerical q and a at the front door. To the Professor, whose memory lasted only eighty minutes, I was always a new housekeeper he was meeting for the first time, and so every morning he was appropriately shy and reserved. He would ask my shoe size or telephone number, or perhaps my zip code, the registration number on my bicycle, or the number of brushstrokes in the characters of my name; and whatever the number, he invariably found some significance in it. Talk of factorials and primes flowed effortlessly, seeming completely natural, never forced.

Later, even after I had learned the meanings of some of these terms, there was still something pleasant about our daily introductions at the door. I found it reassuring to be reminded that my telephone number had some significance (beyond its usual purpose), and the simple sound of the numbers helped me to start the day’s work with a positive attitude.

He had once been an expert in number theory at a university. He was sixty-four, but he looked older and somewhat haggard, as though he did not eat properly. He was barely more than five feet tall, and his back was so badly hunched that he seemed even shorter. The wrinkles on his bony neck looked a little grimy, and his wispy, snow-white hair fell in all directions, half-concealing his plump, Buddhalike ears. His voice was feeble and his movements were slow. If you looked closely, though, you could see traces of a face that had once been handsome. There was something in the sharp line of his jaw and his deeply carved features that was still attractive.

Whether he was at home or going out—which he did very rarely—the Professor always wore a suit and tie. His closet held three suits, one for winter, one for summer, and one that could be worn in spring or fall, three neckties, six shirts, and an overcoat. He did not own a sweater or a pair of casual pants. From a housekeeper’s point of view, it was the ideal closet.

I suspect that the Professor had no idea there were clothes other than suits. He had no interest in what people wore, and even less in his own appearance. For him it was enough to get up in the morning, open the closet, and put on whichever suit wasn’t wrapped in plastic from the cleaners. All three suits were dark and well-worn, much like the Professor himself, and clung to him like a second skin.

But by far the most curious thing about the Professor’s appearance was the fact that his suit was covered with innumerable scraps of notepaper, each one attached to him by a tiny binder clip. Every conceivable surface—the collar, cuffs, pockets, hems, belt loops, and buttonholes—was covered with notes, and the binder clips gathered the fabric of his clothing in awkward bunches. The notes were simply scraps of torn paper, some yellowing or crumbling. In order to read them, you had to get close and squint, but it soon became clear that he was compensating for his lack of memory by writing down the things he absolutely had to remember and pinning them where he couldn’t lose them—on his body. His odd appearance was as distracting as his questions about my shoe size.

Come in then, he said. I have to work, but you just do whatever it is you have to do. And with that he disappeared into his study. As he turned and walked away, the notes made a dry, rustling sound.

From the bits and pieces of information I gleaned from the nine housekeepers who had come before me, it seemed that the old woman in the main house was a widow, and that her husband had been the Professor’s older brother. When their parents had died, his brother had taken over the family textile business, had enlarged it considerably, and willingly assumed the cost of educating a brother who was a dozen years younger. In this way, the Professor had been able to pursue his study of mathematics at Cambridge University. But soon after he had received his doctorate and had found a position at a research institute, his brother had died suddenly of acute hepatitis. The widow, who had no children, decided to close down the factory, put up an apartment building on the land, and live off the rents she

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