The Housekeeper and the Professor
by Yoko Ogawa, 2003
translated by Stephen Snyder, 2009

This was a very small and sedate novel, focusing on the characters, and experiencing the world through those characters, rather than any particular plot. It was also a quietly sad story about a successful friendship. It has the feel of a classic, or an archetype, helped by the way that none of the characters are named.

I rarely read books from the Literature genre, which might explain why this book felt so unique to me, but I think it really is unique. I rarely read Literature in part because I don’t tend to enjoy it, but I did like this one. Despite how different it was from other books I’ve read, or maybe because of it, my brain kept reminding me of other books that had some point of similarity.

It had a similarity in tone to the calmness of The Empress of Jade and Fortune. A scant handful of characters and a house. Nothing terrible happens in the book, and anything that happened in the past has been survived, by these characters at least.

The titular Professor reminded me of Paul Erdős from The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, and also of Charlie Gordon in the later half of “Flowers for Algernon”. The professor is a mathematician who sees the deep beauty of numbers and also a brilliant man with a brain injury that he’s aware of and trying to compensate for. His injury prevents him from making new memories, so that every day he meets his housekeeper for the first time.

The book itself delves into some of the math puzzles and history that he tells to the housekeeper and her son, and shows how the housekeeper learns to appreciate the endless stability and mystery of the numbers as well, despite her not being particularly mathematically inclined. That aspect reminded me of Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, a book that attempted to shoehorn a philosophy textbook into a novel and that I did not much care for. This book is somewhat more successful, I think, in including a few actual mathematics principles with explanations, and might be an interested way to introduce the concepts to a student.

The book is written in the first-person by the housekeeper, and her perspective is fascinating in its incompleteness. There are events in her own life as well as in the professor’s life that she never gets the full story for, and also doesn’t look for. It’s left to the reader to consider what we know or can guess but also put aside what we don’t know and live in the moment. The book as a whole felt like a wonderful and much needed break from the frantic plots and fraught relationships of much of my other reading. I really enjoyed it.