The Housekeeper and the Professor: ‘a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow’ Publishers Weekly

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Yōko Ogawa ( 小川 洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored „An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics“ with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers. The Professor uses every opportunity to bring up the subject of numbers, the beauty of numbers, and the mystery of the relationships between them.

Krauss presents a decidedly Aristotelian vision of the world. Samson Greene is a physical scientist. He is a materialist in the sense that he lives in a world of strict cause and effect. Memory is a necessary causal condition for Samson’s emotions. Everything must have a cause and all causes are material in character. So no memory, no emotion. The cause/effect chain in his brain has been interrupted. The result is not simply that he doesn’t recognise his wife, he doesn’t recognise himself. He has lost his identity. He cannot remember his own name. While he mildly regrets these facts, he feels nothing more about them.

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.

Gorgeous, cinematic . . . The Housekeeper and the Professor is a perfectly sustained novel . . . like a note prolonged, a fermata, a pause enabling us to peer intently into the lives of its characters. . . . This novel has all the charm and restraint of any by Ishiguro or Kenzaburo Oe and the whimsy of Murakami. The three lives connect like the vertices of a triangle.” —Susan Salter Reynolds , Los Angeles Times 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. A] mysterious, suspenseful, and radiant fable . . . The smart and resourceful housekeeper, the single mother of a baseball-crazy 10-year-old boy the Professor adores, falls under the spell of the beautiful mathematical phenomena the Professor elucidates, as will the reader, and the three create an indivisible formula for love.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... for a discussion of the implications of these two books as a critique of science more generally.When he finds out that she has a ten-year old boy who is a latch-key kid waiting at home for her, he insists that she let the boy come over after school. So the boy starts learning math. We learn quite a bit about simple math in the process – things like prime numbers and amicable numbers. And I probably shouldn’t say ‘simple’ math – I should say ‘easily understandable’ math the way it is presented. (The Wikipedia review of the book has a list of a dozen math concepts talked about in the book.) What we also learn is that, although the professor’s presumption is that he is teaching the boy, the housekeeper is fascinated by the subject and she is good at math. As we learn her story - single mom, only child of another single mom - it’s unfortunate she had to drop out to start working full-time before finishing high school. She’s better at solving math problems than her bright son is. 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. 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.

Samson suffers mildly but has no real grief. He is now something other than human. He will probably function adequately and be perceived as normal, if somewhat aloof, by the world at large. The Professor on the other hand, may be pitiable to some, like his sister-in-law, and he does suffer, often intensely. But he is not pitiable to his housekeeper and her son. Through practical love and instinctive respect, they adapt to his condition and learn to live in his Platonic world, to their benefit as well as his. In a small but important way, he has improved the world.The new housekeeper comes every day to help the Professor go through his days. Her son also starts showing up at the Professor's house after school. The woman and the boy come to form a close bond with the aging man. Except for the son who the Professor calls Root because the top of his head is flat like a square root sign none of them have names. There is also the Professor’s Sister-in-law or the Widow, she manages the Professor’s affairs and hires the Housekeeper. Soon the housekeeper begins to take her young son to work, and he and the old man become friends. (The Professor decides to call him Root, after the square-root sign, because the top of his head is flat: his mother never refers to him by any other name.) Subsequently, nothing much happens. There is a subplot about baseball, which may excite American readers more than British ones. The housekeeper takes the Professor to get his hair cut, after which she remarks, perfectly: "For once he smelled of shaving cream rather than of paper." A conflict with the Professor's overprotective sister-in-law is somehow defused by the writing down of Euler's formula on a scrap of paper. The Professor wins a contest in a mathematics magazine and waves away congratulations, saying he just "peeked in God's notebook". An old box is rummaged through. The characters age. The professor and the boy are also fascinated by baseball stats. The professor still thinks his favorite baseball team has the same players it had in 1975 when he suffered his injury. She takes them both to a baseball game – neither has ever been. Little by little they basically become a family. This obviously affects the life of the main character and forces him to change entirely his way of living. He is to stop teaching and live mostly on the charity of his relatives.