Japanese Novel Offers Seductive Mathematics

March 3, 2009

The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel, by Yoko Ogawa, which has been translated from the 2003 Japanese edition by Stephen Snyder, is a tale about a brain-injured mathematician and the woman who comes every day to prepare his meals.

"None of the characters is ever named. Nothing romantic or even dramatic ever happens. And there is a lot of conversation about math," reviewer Ron Charles wrote in the Washington Post. "And yet The Housekeeper and the Professor is strangely charming, flecked with enough wit and mystery to keep us engaged throughout."

The story begins in 1992 when the narrator, a home care aide, is assigned to look after a former world-class mathematician who had hit his head in a car accident years earlier. Because of the injury, the mathematician lives with only 80 minutes of short-term memory (shades of the films Groundhog Day and Memento).

When the housekeeper arrives at the cottage on her first day, the professor greets her by asking, "What's your shoe size?" She tells him, "Twenty-four centimeters."

"That's a sturdy number," he says. "It's a factorial of four."

"What's your telephone number?" the professor then asks. She gives it to him. "That's the total number of primes between one and one hundred million," he states.

The same numerical interview recurs each morning.

The author, Charles wrote, is "interested in quieter kinds of delight, particularly the pleasure of numbers, which provide a series of metaphors for the friendships that develop."

The most touching involves the housekeeper's 11-year-old son, whom the professor nicknames Root because his flat-top head reminds him of a square root sign. "He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers," the housekeeper notes. "For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world."

"There are formulas throughout these pages, strings of numbers—real and imaginary—and explanations of primes and logarithms, Fermat's Last Theorem, and Euler's formula," the Washington Post reviewer said. Yet, "no matter how much you hated math in high school, you can't help but be seduced by the housekeeper's enthusiasm for what she discovers."

Solving a problem the professor sets for her and Root, the housekeeper says that she experienced "a kind of revelation for the first time in my life, a sort of miracle."

"In the midst of a vast field of numbers, a straight path opened before my eyes," she continues. "A light was shining at the end, leading me on, and I knew then that it was the path to enlightenment."

The housekeeper becomes especially impressed by the professor's insight into the mathematical underpinnings of the universe, what she calls "God's notebooks."

"Ogawa never minimizes the professor's limitation or the difficulties of caring for him," Charles concluded, "but she has a sublime sense of his value, his enduring capacity for affection, and his ability to illuminate the world of numbers."

Excerpt.

Source: Washington Post, Feb. 15, 2009.