I just finished this book, The Housekeeper and the Professor by, Yoko Ogawa. I won’t try and pretend to write a critique or review of the book. I will say that when I picked it up I thought it was going to be a dramatically depressing story – one that had the potential to keep me up at night worrying about my mortality and what I might have to suffer through as I age. Instead, what I got was a lovely story that you should read. Right now.
We don’t carry this book at Japanistic.com, so you have to buy it somewhere else. Just, please, don’t buy it at Amazon. Go to your local bookseller and buy it there. Or call them and have them order the book.
Here is the publisher’s note:
He is a brilliant math professor, with a peculiarn problem–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 between them a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms. Though the professor can hold new memories for only eighty mintues, his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past; and through him, the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the housekeeper and her son. “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 where one before did not exist.
