The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel Spiral-Bound | February 3, 2009

From one of Japan's most beloved bestselling authors, Yoko Ogawa, comes an achingly beautiful story about family, memory, and math.

"Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching."—Paul Auster

He is a brilliant math professor, with a peculiar problem—since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short term memory. She is an astute young housekeeper with a ten-year-old son who is hired care for him. And between them a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms. Though the professor can hold new memories for only eighty mintues, his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever math riddles—based on the housekeeper's shoe size or her birthday—and the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both her and her little boy.


The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.