FFB-THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR: Yoko Ogawa

 

 

SPOILERS AHEAD

A Japanese housekeeper with a ten-year old boy takes a job cleaning and cooking for a mathematician whose memory is only good for 80 minutes. This is a dear book. It reminded me a lot of The Elegance of the Hedgehog. The story concerns how she circumnavigates this dilemma, the relationship between the housekeeper's son and the professor, the beauty of math, and Japanese baseball. There were a few surprises and some failures for me although I liked the book very much. The housekeeper becomes fairly skilled in math over the course of the book and yet at its end she is still keeping house. The book suggests there might have been some sort of relationship between the professor and his sister-in-law yet never really pursues it. And thirdly, the professor seems to  have little interest in the housekeeper, only her son, which seems strange. Perhaps some of this was lost in translation. Her more recent book The Memory Police was definitely a big leap forward both in concept and in writing. But this was very enjoyable in its own way. There is a film version of this but I can't find out where to stream it so I guess it is lost to us in that format.