“Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won’t find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions. Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression — in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so...”
While reading Yoko Ogawa’s 2003 novel The Housekeeper and
the Professor (translated to English by Stephen Snyder in 2009), I kept
wondering if it was the same Ogawa who wrote the eerie novellas and unsettling
short stories, published under the titles ‘The Diving Pool’ (Ogawa’s first work
to be translated to English) and ‘Revenge’. If those works I first read of
Ogawa had a spooky fun-house quality, The Housekeeper and the Professor could
be described as charming and heartwarming. I wouldn’t say the novel was as
riveting as the author's previous works I read. Yet this slender novel has an
extraordinary premise and evokes honest, powerful emotions without becoming
melodramatic or sentimental.
Set in the year 1992, the eponymous unnamed housekeeper and
our narrator is a young single mother, who receives a job from the Akebono
Housekeeping Agency to take care of an old
professor. The professor’s sister-in-law informs the housekeeper about the unusually
challenging nature of her job. The professor is a brilliant mathematician who
after a car accident in 1975 suffers from short-term memory loss. His memory
lasts only 80 minutes (which means he can’t remember anything past the year
1975) and he is intimated of his own condition and other vital things through
post-it notes affixed to his jacket with safety pins. While the professor’s
memory fails him, he takes comfort in the numbers. In fact, he gets acquainted
with his housekeeper everyday (whose image is roughly drawn in a paper
decorating his suit to remind him who she is) through questions related to
numbers: “What’s your shoe size?”, “What’s your date of birth?”, “How much did
you weigh when you were born?” -- these are the number-related questions he
poses to his housekeeper.
The professor spends most of his time solving complex math
problems for prize money or wrestles with proof for new theorems. The numbers
give him the continuity his memory couldn’t. At the same time, the professor’s
compassionate behavior and unbridled love for mathematics affects the
housekeeper too and later shapes the future of her 10-year-old son, nicknamed
‘Root’ by the professor. A tender friendship forms between the three people of
different age group and sensibilities. Their mutual love for numbers and
baseball helps them create a make-shift family. The housekeeper and her son
learn to accommodate themselves according to the professor’s abridged memory. The
friendship between them reveals hidden beauty of math as well as the hidden
beauty of human connection.
The Housekeeper and the Professor is a simple, cozy novel
that explores the themes of memory, family, healing, and loss. Ogawa does a
good job in often relating the warm relationship between the three to a math
theory or special numbers: like the housekeeper learning about ‘amicable
numbers’ or the professor’s kindness towards Root is compared with his love for
‘Primes’, and the professor cutting short a bitter argument by writing Euler’s
formula. The friendship is slightly romanticized, but Ogawa includes tangible
bittersweet notes to the keep the premise’ sentimentality in check. The
author’s prose is clear and precise so that she never goes overboard with
emotions. Eventually, the underlying commentary in the professor’s love for
mathematics and his memory condition is beautifully fleshed out; the challenges
related to math isn’t solved by preservation and acquisition of memories, but by
scrutinizing the problems with fresh set of eyes every time. That also has
something to say about quotidian life and human connections.
P.S.: The book was adapted into a movie (‘The Professor’s
Beloved Equation’) in 2006 by Takashi Koizumi, which largely stayed faithful to
the source novel.
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