The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

The Housekeeper and the Professor (博士の愛した数式) by Yoko Ogawa is a short read, mesmerising in its heart-warming story about unlikely friendships, mathematics and baseball. It has sold in excess of 4 million copies in Japan alone.

This is a beautifully-written story about an old maths professor, his housekeeper and her young son. After a traffic accident in 1975, the professor’s memory post-1975 lasts only 80 minutes. His memory prior to the accident remains intact. He wears a suit with notes pinned all over it to remind him of things he will soon forget, the most prominent of which says, “My memory only lasts 80 minutes.” He has trouble interacting with other people and a habit of talking about numbers when he does not know what else to say. He lives in a ramshackle cottage in his sister-in-law’s backyard, spending most of his time solving math puzzles.

The sister-in-law hires a housekeeper to take care of the professor. The housekeeper comes every day in the morning and makes breakfast, does all the household chores, and makes dinner. She is twenty-nine years old, has never married, and has a boy of age ten.

The book is narrated by the housekeeper of the title. Every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.

When the professor discovers, over and over again, that the housekeeper has a young son, the professor tells the housekeeper to bring her son to the cottage so he won’t be alone at home after school. He adds a picture of the boy to the note he keeps pinned to himself to remind him of his new housekeeper’s son. The professor calls the housekeeper’s son Root because his flat head reminds him of the mathematical sign for a square root. A very unlikely relationship among the three people starts.

The professor’s  80 minutes of memory eventually begins to fail, and thus he is moved to a nursing home where he spends the rest of his remaining days. But the Housekeeper, her son Root, and his sister-in-law continue to visit him.

This amazing slim book hit all the right notes for me. From the very first page, I was charmed by Ogawa’s writing style, seemingly simple but yet so charged with emotions, and beyond charming. This is one of the most charming novels I’ve ever read.