Customer Reviews

The Housekeeper and the Professor

5 star:		(89)
4 star:		(52)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Yoko Ogawa's "The Housekeeper and the Professor" is the sort of novel publishers release for sheer love of books. It's unlikely to be made into a blockbuster film, it admits no franchise possibility, it has no fist fights or car chases. But it's the kind of book that makes me want to read, and it will enjoy the loyalty of anyone who reads because the word is a joy in itself.

Ogawa creates a world remarkably free of names. The first-person narrator is called only "I," and she keeps house for an invalid genius she only terms "the Professor." These two form a non-traditional family with the Housekeeper's son, nicknamed Root, in "a small city on the Inland Sea." The only proper nouns are prominent mathematicians and Japanese baseball heroes.

In this regard, the novel recalls Expressionistic plays of the early Twentieth Century, peopled by characters with names like "Boss," "Stranger," and "Woman #4." Or perhaps it's more like Aesop's fables. But it clearly signals that these characters relate according to their responsibilities, not their identities.

The Housekeeper and her son build a bond with the Professor based on loyalty and his love of teaching. Their every accomplishment brings effusive praise from the old man they're actually caring for. But the trick is that the Professor has a head injury that has scrambled his limbic system. Nothing entering his head leaves a mark lasting longer than eighty minutes.

The Professor needs someone to care for, while the Housekeeper and Root long for a man in their lives to complete their troubled family. The Professor's yin finds the Housekeeper's yang. Root and the Housekeeper are inspired to be better people by the Professor, and seek after his praise, even knowing as they do that in eighty minutes he won't even remember.

Math, for the Professor, is not a drab science; it's a work of art and a mode of prayer. And it is this love of beauty and spirituality that inspires the Housekeeper and Root. Math is a tool that brings them together as a family and motivates them to reach for something higher.

The story is cerebral and episodic, in the style of many Japanese art novels. It doesn't burst like a string of dynamite. Readers weaned on the cinematic style of paperback American fiction will seek in this novel for sturm und drang which never arrives. But lovers of the magic of language will find this a refreshing rest from breathless American pop fiction.

This novel has a self-selecting audience made up of those who truly love when the magic of words changes the way we look at our world. Stunning, punchy, smart and touching. A book that reminds readers that we read for a reason.

Yoko Ogawa's quiet and insightful story, The Housekeeper and The Professor surprised me in several ways. For starters, I found myself transfixed by a story that relies heavily on two things I normally can't stand: math and baseball. These two subjects serve as metaphors in Ogawa's touching story about a young housekeeper, her memory-impaired professor client, and her 10-year-old son. Far from being cheap literary devices, mathematics - and to a smaller extent, baseball - form the basis of a strong bond between the three principal characters. All three are outcasts in their own way, and each possess some level of naive purity of character, which makes their ultimate friendship all the more touching. They are an unlikely trio, however the relationship that grows between them is as close as any family bond could ever be.

I also didn't expect this little book to be so inspiring and influential. The Housekeeper and the Professor is a haunting, beautifully written tale that will cause the reader to consider what constitutes family and what life's obligations entail. Ogawa's portrayal of the professor is particularly moving. Injured in a car accident in the early 1970s, he has only 80 minutes of short-term memory and must re-learn relationships and basic information on a continual basis. A brilliant mathematician, he uses math as a primary means of communication - he is most comfortable when talking about numbers and has a gift for making the complex seem simple. While lacking in memory, he has a natural and instinctual affinity for children, and bonds instantly with the housekeeper's son. The boy's presence helps to bring the professor out of his insular world - in fact the child is the only thing that the professor seems to care about beside his beloved prime numbers. The two bond over math, and later baseball, and their relationships nurtures and enriches both of their lives, as well as that of the housekeeper.

Ogawa's mastery at creating deep, multi-dimensional characters is all the more fascinating in this story because the reader never actually learns the subject's names (save for a curious nickname given to the boy by the professor). The reader is able to easily get to know the characters and feel empathy for them without knowing their names. The story transcends the need for names - in fact, I didn't notice the lack of given names until I was halfway through the book. Rather than focuses on something as mundane as a name, Ogawa chooses to give her readers a glimpse of her character's psyches. She wants us to ponder why people they act as they do, what motivates their actions and decisions, and to wonder why certain events happen. Ogawa's writing style is subtle, elegant and multidimensional. The story transcends time and geography and is applicable to just about everyone.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is a lovely, intriguing rendering of human relations and emotion that possess a calm dignity. Ogawa, who is well-known in her native Japan, has a gift for subtlety and an understanding of human psychology that allows her to build realistic, full-bodied characters who strike a chord with readers. I wasn't expecting to like this book - but its beauty and compassion won me over despite my fear of math and loathing of baseball.

Note: The book was made into a movie in Japan in 2006.

The trouble with writing a review of this book is that I have just finished reading it but I am certainly not finished thinking about it. The Professor suffered a brain injury which limits his short term memory to 80 minutes. His long term memories end on the day of the auto accident. The Professor thinks nearly exclusively about number theory, the rarely practical, elegant study of numbers themselves and their relationship with one another. The Housekeeper begins as a young mother merely trying to survive and raise her son with dignity. The story, on the surface, is the improbable family that arises, the odd but intense bond that grows between the three. The Professor's emotions are childlike and his love of children is intense. That present, immediate love showers over the Housekeeper's son, called "Root" by the Professor, helps the boy to grow and teaches the Housekeeper how to better love her child. Root and the Professor love baseball even if the team they root for are from different eras, and they form a bond that the lack of common memory cannot impair. The Housekeeper becomes fascinated by the elegance of numbers and by baseball. She is a better mother and a fuller person as a result of both. The characters are changed over time--except perhaps the professor: how can you change if you have no memory?


Like most books by Asian authors I have read, the language and story is beautifully spare, clear and relies on inference. Yoko Ogawa, and her translator, leave a lot of room for readers to reach their own conclusions (how can the Professor's love for the child be personal if he cannot remember the person?) There is discussion of theorems and formulas, with the proofs shown on the page. I am not drawn to number theory but the same spare elegance of the numbers inform the story. The rarity of prime numbers in really big numbers suggests the rarity of perfect moments in the course of a long life. Perhaps the joy of discovering a large prime is analogous to the joy of the rare but perfect moments of our lives. Perhaps I'm full of it, too. But because of what is not said, the reflective reader finds herself staring into the distance, thinking about the book (imagine being a child greeted with new joy and respect daily? What does that do for a child?). The Housekeeper and the Professor invites the reader to become engaged in a broader way than is possible in merely telling a tale.


Another reviewer said this is the sort of book published for the love of good writing and that is not likely to be made into a made for TV movie, and he's right. Its 180 pages goes by very quickly unless you pause to think through some of the formulas as math (I did not)rather than as literature (I did). How can formulas be literature? It's that kind of book, perhaps taking you where you have not been before and blending the authors thoughts with your own. Other readers will ask different questions as a result of reading it. It is very hard to ask more of a book than that.


I loved the book and will read it again. I imagine this book will probably not find a broad audience, but its readership will be devout.

Most of life's pleasures bear the brand "ephemeral" and for the main character of the Professor in Yoko Ogawa's novel, "The Housekeeper and the Professor" (published also as "The Gift of Numbers" and adapted to film under the name "The Professor's Beloved Equation (Formula)) this simple fact could not be truer or more laced with bittersweet irony.

A one-time instructor in mathematics, the professor lives under the watchful albeit somewhat distant eye of his sister-in-law, the only person from the present still retained within the realm of his older memory and not forgotten after a period consisting of a scant eighty minutes. Ogawa, modeling her protagonist after another short-term memory victim, insurance fraud investigator Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) in the 2000 film "Memento", allows her professor recall to elusive memory through scraps of paper covered with relevant tidbits of information pinned to his jacket rather than the almost grotesque prison-club tattooing that Shelby employed to remind himself of what occurred prior to the rollover of his critical time span. With her exquisite minimalist prose, Ogawa conveys the sad despair of loneliness and the sweetness of selflessness while using the magic of numbers to define the universal need to belong and be a part of someone else's life.

However disabled the professor's life may seem, he still maintains an extraordinary quality of well-being through his love and understanding of what for him embodies the ultimate truth. In weighing the unquestionable paradox of simplicity and complexity that formulates the absolute beauty of mathematics, the professor manages to inadvertently spark the lives of the single mother housekeeper who is hired to care for him and that of Root, her young ten-year-old son with insight into an abstract world that they never imagined. Even within the confines of this eighty-minute long statute of limitations, the bond achieved by the trio is forged by their ability to share and remember mathematical experiences that perpetrate ah-ha moments of understanding with regard to the absolute. This insight links the threesome together more cohesively and with seemingly greater sticking power than any of the usual day-to-day goings-on experienced by commonplace families. The ensuing creation of a lasting intimate connection transcends the many difficulties encountered as a result of the professor's disability, his sister-in-law's vigilance and Root's desire to penetrate the darkness that prevents the professor from tabulating the loving moments proffered by him and his mother and produces a formula for happiness that is as nearly perfect as the most elegant equation exacting the music of the spheres and fabric of the cosmos.

Bottom line: In "The Housekeeper and the Professor," Yoko Ogawa writes a small masterpiece that encompasses all the profundity of the perfect haiku. Fold upon fold, she fashions her flawless origami precisely in small vignettes that viewed as a whole exudes a fullness of feeling that not only proclaims the sum to be greater than its parts but reveals the ensuing fabrication to be something intangibly beautiful that is undeniably clean and distinctive as a Japanese woodcut. Recommended.
Diana Faillace Von Behren
"reneofc"

Given the overall number of stars the book has received, you should certainly consider this to be a minority opinion. But that too, I suppose, is a voice that needs to be heard.

I put off discussing the book with my wife (who really enjoyed it); then I spent several minutes staring at the computer trying to collect my thoughts. The truth is, I was never really engaged in this novella, and even now I find the birds fluttering outside my window a tempting distraction.

Like TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, THE HOUSEKEEPER... is essentially a fictionalized memoir recalling the wonders and trials of roughly a two-year period, especially the summers. But whereas TKM is as rich as it is modest, THE HOUSEKEEPER... really failed to affect me either emotionally or intellectually. The two extended metaphors, mathematics and baseball, never rise above their status as metaphors (the wonders of the human imagination; an abstract order superimposed upon chaos), and fall flat when they should be profound.

Things of great interest---the nature and circumstance surrounding the professor's injury; its emotional and psychological import; the nature and meaning of his relationship with "the widow" (his sister-in-law); the human (=emotional) costs of, in the narrator's case, being a single mother in Japan---these are never really developed.

One critic claimed that the book had "all the whimsy of Murakami." Really? Either he hadn't read Ogawa's book, or he hadn't read Murakami; he cannot have read both, in the same way that an object cannot be both hot and cold at the same time and in the same respect. Since there is no magical realism at play in Ogawa's book I can only assume that the perceived similarity stems from the fact that both authors are Japanese, in which case he really needs to read more non-Western lit.

Paul Auster called it "touching," which it is. But it is touching like Haiku poetry is "touching:"

Fat cow chews on grass
Verdant fields of summer green
Diet not so good

Touching, fine. Okay.

But I can't help but wonder: If a westerner had said it, would anyone have cared?

This is an elegant, calm read that will most likely never appear on any bestseller lists. There is no emotional roller coaster or highs and lows, only excellent prosaic writing and a simple elegant story with real characters. It's about living in the moment and the meaning of family and true friendship. It does deal with some complex issues, but the tone is quiet and subdued never hurried. I think the concept of a person's memory only lasting eighty minutes is unique and beautifully portrays the meaning of unconditional love. The professor's limited means of communication is through numbers so the book has some mathematical descriptions. Don't let this deter you from reading the book if you hate math; it's a common ground for bonding, not about learning or comprehending math. I recommend this book to those who love character driven books replete with compassion that leave you pondering life and your own good fortune.

This slim novel tells an apparently simple story. In rural Japan, a mathematics professor has suffered a brain injury. He remembers only the last 80 minutes of current events since the accident. After a string of housekeepers can't deal with his peculiar demands, one housekeeper is determined to do the job right. In the process she comes to love this strange, cranky, brilliant man.

The story isn't a romance at all, with the age difference and the professor's profound mental deficit, but the housekeeper, her 10-year old son, and the professor do begin to form a kind of a family.

There isn't much of a plot, but there are obstacles and setbacks to their relationship, and the novel covers a complete story arc.

The most unique aspect of the book is the inclusion of mathematics. Relatively advanced concepts -- mostly attributes of prime numbers -- are introduced with affection and ease. If you're not familiar with higher mathematics, you will likely learn a few things, the most important being the joyful attitude mathematicians have toward their field.

If you really, really hate math, though, it might be hard to enjoy this book.

Overall, highly recommended.

"The Housekeeper and the Professor" is a unique and delightful novel, one of the most original books I've read.

We never learn the names of the 3 main characters in this story. Yes, as I said, an unusual book. The aging professor needs help living on his own. He has a short term memory problem - he can only remember things for 80 minutes. As a result, each morning when his housekeeper arrives for the day, he is (in his mind) meeting her for the first time.

Early in the book, the professor learns that his housekeeper has a 10 year old son. At his urging, the housekeeper and her son agree to join the professor for dinner each evening. Once the three dine together on a routine basis, the story begins to develop.

The relationship between these 3 characters makes the book. Strangely enough, they often use math to communicate. Whenever the professor needs to make small talk, he does so by discussing math. The housekeeper and her son soon follow the professor, a talented mathematician, and they too begin to appreciate math.

In some ways this book reminds me of a long short story rather than a novel. It's an enjoyable read. Highly recommended.

I appreciate so many aspects of this gentle little book, especially the love story hidden at its center. But I fear I've somehow missed the point.

In modern Japan, a housekeeper with a young son is hired to care for an elderly mathematics genius whose traumatic brain injury has left him with an 80 minute memory span. They very gently work their way into an understanding and loving family unit, with the help of baseball, math lessons, and patience. The characters were extremely well handled, all sympathetic and believable. The central plot device of a 80 minute memory span was interesting, if not exactly convincing. I don't care about math or baseball, but found the parts played by both in the story to be engaging. And as I said, the hidden love story, once revealed, really touched me.

Still, I can't figure out what was missing for me. I read it quickly, closed it softly, and shrugged. It is barely a blip on the radar of my reading experience, and I am so baffled as to what other readers have seen in it to send them into these transports of praise. Though it's sweet and kind and mildly engaging, I feel no urge to rave about it or loan it to anyone.

My apologies, but this book just didn't do it for me.

This was an intriguing little book. . .but somehow the type of memory loss makes some of the emotions and relationships seem unlikely. . .the professor would not have made it thru half of the ballgame he attended. . .beautiful writing, what I missed was what was the deal with the sister-in-law whom we now imagine he loved (or I did). . .and do we know where the two were heading when the accident occurred? Is this important? I don't know. I didn't care for his reading backwards as it wasn't entirely backwards - had a tinge of pig-latin. But I love numbers and hey I never knew what a perfect number was and now I love the number 28 (you'll have to read the book to learn). I'm a math major and very few people appreciate some of the small
beauties of mathematics. . .so that was fun for me. There are just some problems
that mar the overall impact for me.