REVIEW: The Housekeeper and the Professor - Yoko Ogawa

• Year first released:  2003 (Japanese), 2009 (English)
• ISBN of the edition I read:  9780312427801
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Picador
• My rating (out of 5):  5

I'm sure you've heard it said before - or perhaps even said it yourself - that "either you're good at English, or you're good at math." I've never felt this way - I've always enjoyed both quite a bit. In fact, in those rare occasions when I come across a combination of the two - say, a novel which uses mathematics as an important motif - chances are quite decent that I'm going to be spellbound by the book.

This was certainly the case with PopCo by Scarlett Thomas, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and Momo by Michael Ende.

This is also exactly what happened with The Housekeeper and the Professor. With it, Ogawa creates what is easily one of the most charming novels I've come across (in a very long time, if not ever), using a simple story peppered with complicated (but well-explained) mathematics, to show us the relationship between the two nameless main characters: an elderly, retired professor of mathematics who suffers from a unique form of dementia, and his newest housekeeper.

The professor's dementia plays a key role in how the plot and the characters develop. After a traumatic car accident over thirty years ago, he can no longer create new memories. Instead, every eighty minutes his short-term memory "resets," so to speak. (You might be reminded of the movie 50 First Dates. Yes, Housekeeper employs a similar trope, but in a significantly more mature, wonderful manner.)

To the professor, everything is mathematical. Upon first meeting his new housekeeper, one of the first questions he asks is her shoe size. Later it's her birthday. Another time it's her height at birth. And all of these, he twists into formulas, explains to her why the numbers are each elegant in their own way, and how everything in life connects more than we realize.

It's a word that Ogawa uses often all throughout the book - "elegant" - which is a perfect description of mathematics, and a perfect description of the book. There's a thread of beauty which courses all throughout the book, whether it's in the professor's mathematical explanations, his metaphors, even the way the narrator (the housekeeper) weaves in and out of chronology to tell her story.

Housekeeper pulses with a profound sense of wonder, but perhaps the most miraculous element of all is that this wonder never dips into the surreal or the otherworldly. Ogawa shows the beauty in coincidence, in numbers, in baseball games and birthday parties and post-it notes. Much like I said in my review of Good Morning, Midnight almost a year ago, Housekeeper doesn't trouble itself with focusing on the negative side of reality. Though of course the book has its tension and conflicts, it is more about the wonder, the beauty, the positivity - without ever overstepping its bounds, sugar-coating its hardships, or dipping its toes into the too-good-to-be-true. It is, instead, a real, earthy novel which knows what it wants to tell us, and tells us in the most graceful way possible.

Throughout the book, we realize that the professor is exactly right: everything in life is mathematical - we just aren't as consistently, acutely aware of it as is the professor. And, if everything is mathematical, then by extension, everything is full of beauty and wonder as well.

Elegant, indeed.