The Housekeeper and the Professor
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0312427808
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem―ever 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 the Professor.
And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor's mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities―like the Housekeeper's shoe size―and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.
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.
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again and he won't remember anything about the Carp." The problem that the Professor had posed to Root proved to be almost as difficult as the one that Enatsu had presented for all of us. As the Professor had predicted, the man at the repair shop said that he had never seen such an old radio and that he wasn't sure he could fix it. But if he could, he said, he would try to have it done in a week's time. So every day, when I got home from work, I spent my evening looking for another way to
know what the evening star meant to him, perhaps finding it in the sky soothed his nerves, or maybe it was simply a habit. And I don't know how he could see it so long before anyone else—he barely noticed the food I set right in front of him. For whatever reason, he would point his withered finger at a single spot in the vast sky—always the right place, as I eventually discovered—and that spot had significance for him and no one else. Root's cut healed, but his attitude was slower to recover.
to its back. Its legs were splayed out under it, as if it had struggled to stand up right to the end. The organs had liquefied, the eyes were black holes, its jaw was slightly parted, revealing little teeth. Root found it. He gave a stifled cry, but then stood there frozen, no more able to open his mouth and call me than to look away. It had probably come running down the mountain and crashed into the stone, dying on the spot. When we looked closer, we could see traces of blood and skin on the
housekeeper's efforts had vanished and the study had returned to its familiar state of disarray. I still had the note the Professor had written the day of my confrontation with his sister-in-law. She hadn't seen me take it; I'd slipped it safely away into my wallet next to a photograph of Root. I went to the library to find out about the formula. The Professor would certainly have explained it to me if I'd asked, but I felt that I would have a much deeper understanding if I struggled with it
when the Professor could no longer reach high enough, Root would bend over so the Professor could rub his head. The Professor's suit never changed. The notes, however, having lost their usefulness, fell off one by one. The one I had rewritten and replaced so many times, the one that read "My memory lasts only eighty minutes," disappeared eventually; and the portrait of me with the square root sign faded and crumbled away. In their place, the Professor wore a new decoration: the Enatsu card we