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

Product Information

When I went for my interview, I was greeted by a slender, elegant old woman with dyed brown hair swept up in a bun. She wore a knit dress and walked with a 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 housekeeper and her son learn so much from the professor, but does he get anything meaningful in return? Root asked. He had just learned fractions at school, and it had taken a half-hour lecture from the Professor to convince him that numbers less than zero even existed, so this was quite a leap. We tried picturing the square root of negative one in our heads: v-1. The square root of 100 is 10; the square root of 16 is 4; the square root of 1 is 1. So the square root of -1 is . . . The mutual respect and affection with which the main characters treat each other shine through, as well. The Professor speaks to two friends as if they were real mathematicians. And the housekeeper and her ten-year-old son start, to their own surprise, absorbing his explanations. Not that kind of love story, but a sad, sweet story about an unlikely friendship between a brilliant mathematician, his housekeeper and her son. There is love just no romance.What I found loveliest is the gradual and steady flowering of the relationship between the Professor, the housekeeper, and her son, Root (a name fondly given by the Professor who delights in mussing the hair on the boy’s flat head). The Professor tells Root, "The square root sign is a generous symbol, it gives shelter to all the numbers." How wonderful! He didn’t press us. On the contrary, he fondly studied our expressions as we mulled over the problem.

One of the most revered voices in literature today gives us a story of love, friend­ship, and heartbreak for the ages. Of all the countless things my son and I learned from the Professor, the meaning of the square root was among the most important. No doubt he would have been bothered by my use of the word countless--too sloppy, for he believed that the very origins of the universe could be explained in the exact language of numbers--but I don't know how else to put it. He taught us about enormous prime numbers with more than a hundred thousand places, and the largest number of all, which was used in mathematical proofs and was in the Guinness Book of Records, and about the idea of something beyond infinity. As interesting as all this was, it could never match the experience of simply spending time with the Professor. I remember when he taught us about the spell cast by placing numbers under this square root sign. It was a rainy evening in early April. My son's schoolbag lay abandoned on the rug. The light in the Professor's study was dim. Outside the window, the blossoms on the apricot tree were heavy with rain. Ogawa, Yoko (2009). The Housekeeper and the Professor (Trans. by Stephen Snyder). New York: Picador. Is there much point having any sort of friendship with or giving happiness to someone who will not remember it? The Housekeeper and the Professor, translated by Stephen Snyder, New York: Picador, 2008. ISBN 0-312-42780-8

Need Help?

Numbers are everywhere - Real, Natural, Imaginary, Perfect, Amicable, Abundant, Deficient, Triangular, Prime (including both Mersenne and Pernicious as well as Twins) to name a few. And they're all here in The Housekeeper and the Professor, which Ms. Ogawa wrote in 2007. The Professor is of mathematics and has amnesia; the housekeeper is devoted and has a son. This melange constitutes the cast of a charming story of mathematics and love, subjects with a connection that is less than obvious. But there is a connection and it is fundamental and profound. The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the “correct miscalculation,” for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers. This gave us confidence even when our best efforts came to nothing.

i was expecting this to be saccharine, but it was actually quite wonderful. it never went too far in telling you how to feel and therefore was much more powerful emotionally.....

Beyond the Book

Deceptively elegant . . . This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water. But even in the clearest waters can lurk currents you don't see until you are in them. Dive into Yoko Ogawa's world . . . and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen.”—Dennis Overbye , The New York Times Book Review This sweetly melancholy novel adheres to the Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty in what is off-center, imperfect. . . . In treating one another with such warm concern and respect, the characters implicitly tell us something about the unforgiving society on the other side of the professor's cottage door. The Housekeeper and the Professor is a wisp of a book, but an affecting one.” —Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe 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