Translated Tuesday – The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

Claire and I started the Translated Tuesday summer series after receiving so many lovely translated works in response to my post about The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  It is appropriate that we end the summer series with The Housekeeper and the Professor because I learned of the book through Hedgehog.  While visiting Portrait of Bookstore, I raved about the book to a fellow customer and the owner, Julie von Zerneck, overheard me and recommended I read The Housekeeper and the Professor.  In true bookseller fashion, she was right, if you like one, you’ll like the other.

The narrator is a housekeeper assigned to work for a math professor with an eighty minute memory.  Due to a head injury, he can remember everything before the accident, but after the accident only the last eighty minutes.  The housekeeper must reintroduce herself every morning.  When confronted with an unfamiliar situation, the professor falls back on talking about numbers.  Each morning when the housekeeper arrives, he asks her phone number or her birth date.  He discovers that her birth date is February 20th or 220.  The number on the back of the watch he won as a prize for solving a math problem is 284.  He notices the relationship between the two numbers:

“[T]hink about these two numbers:  220 and 284.  Do they mean anything to you?”

Pulling me by my apron strings, he sat me down at the table and produced a pencil stub from his pocket.  On the back of an advertising insert, he wrote the two numbers . . . “Well, what do you make of them?”

I wiped my hands on my apron, feeling awkward, as the Professor looked at me expectantly.  I wanted to respond, but had no idea what sort of answer would please a mathematician.  To me, they were just numbers.

“Well I stammered. “I suppose you could say they’re both three-digit numbers.  And that they’re fairly similar in size–for example, if I were in the meat section at the supermarket, there’d be very little difference between a package of sausage that weighed 220 grams and one that weighed 284 grams.  They’re so close that I would just buy the one that was fresher.  They seem pretty much the same–they’re bothin the two hundreds, and they’re both even–”

“Good!” he almost shouted, shaking the leather strap of his watch. . . “It’s important to use your intuition.  You swoop down on numbers, like a kingfisher catching the glint of sunlight on the fish’s fin.”

The Professor’s enthusiasm for math and joy in sharing it is a building block in the relationship.  The housekeeper’s willingness and curiosity about math fuels their discussions.   And the relationship between 220 and 284?  They are amicable numbers, the sum of the factors of 220 equals the sum of the factors of 284, which perfectly describes the professor and the housekeeper, externally they are different but their hearts connect.

While I’m far from a math whizz, the math topics enrich the story and the book gives meaning to the math.  Unable to express his feelings for the housekeeper and her son, Root, the Professor instead writes down Euler’s Identity, known as the most beautiful theorem in mathematics.  Fans of  The Girl Who Played with Fire will notice the appearance of Fermat’s Last Theorem; after reading two novels that discuss this theorem I still barely understand the problem let alone a solution.

The Professor states that the goal of math is to find the truth.  I found that his lack of memory exposed a truth about people, that peeling away memory and truly living in the present can uncover the heart of a person.  The Professor doesn’t know Root from day-to-day, but each day his immediate love for children pours from him when Root arrives.  Out of concern for the Professor, the housekeeper carefully rebuilds their relationship each day.  The Housekeeper and the Professor paints a word portrait of people who create a family out what they can bring to a relationship; it’s a beautiful picture.

 The housekeeper finds the Professor’s ability to describe math as poetic and I would use the same word to describe Ogawa’s writing.  She takes subjects such as math, failing health and baseball and in less than 200 pages writes a heart warming relationship between the professor, his housekeeper and Root.  This book is truly precious.

While this is our last weekly Translated Tuesday post, we discovered a fascinating world with translated literature so there will be future reviews–watch for them.