The Housekeeper and the Professor

The Housekeeper & the Professor / Yoko Ogawa
trans. from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

NY: Picador, 2009, c2003.

180 p.

I usually really enjoy Japanese fiction, and I love math, and quirky novels too. So I really expected to love this highly praised novel from a few years ago. 

But... I didn't. I liked it, I found quite a bit to admire in it, but I never really felt drawn in by the concept, the characters or the ideas. 

The Housekeeper is a single mother working for an agency who assigns her to the Professor, a brilliant math instructor who lost his memory in a terrible car accident in 1975. He only remembers things for 80 minutes at a time since then. She finds this a strange and unsettling job at first, but begins to connect with the Professor as he talks about math and equations and the connections between numbers like her birth date or shoe size and mathematical concepts. 

Then she introduces her young son to the Professor, who immediately nicknames him "Root" due to the square shape of his head, resembling the square root sign. The Professor inexplicably feels drawn to protect Root, although we never find out why. 

There is a lot of quiet Japanese detail and lots of discussion of the Housekeeper's life and her growing admiration for math. She was hard for me to engage with, however, as I didn't feel she was completely convincing. Plus she was continually abasing herself to make sure that both Root and the Professor had everything they wanted, even when it made things more difficult and resulted in less for herself. I found that characteristic irritating. 

I wanted to love the math in this but found it just too abstract and like it was trying to be meaningful, rather than intrinsically being so. It came across as a little dull, actually. Also, there is a strong line going through the book of their obsession with baseball, and one player in particular who the Professor remembers. I really couldn't care less about baseball, and this attempt to slot it into this story made it feel like a Murakami book rather than the kind of book I generally prefer. 

So, I didn't love this one after all. It felt dull and like it just petered out for me; not the right book at the right time for this reader, anyhow.