The Housekeeper and the Professor Book

Happy Cubs opening day! 2018 has not been the reading year I had planned on so far. Real life and the stress that goes with it have gotten in the way of being able to focus on reading. Hopefully that changes. In the meantime in honor of the Cubs first home game this year, I am reposting my favorite baseball book from last year, a lovely novella that I am fortunate did not fly under my radar. The Housekeeper and the Professor was recommended to me by my Goodreads' friend Diane because she knows that I love baseball. This March, Japan is participating in the World Baseball Classic so I found this slim novel to be a reminder that America's pastime is now played happily all over the world.

Yoko Ogawa has been a leading Japanese novelist for twenty years. In this touching story, she creates a family out of a housekeeper, her ten year old son, and the math professor whose cottage they were asked to tend to. The Professor is a math genius, but seventeen years prior to the events of this novel he suffered brain trauma in an accident. As a result his short term memory is only 80 minutes long, and he clips notes to his suit in order to remember important information. Fortunately, the math theorems for which he earned a PhD and many honors as well as his ability to teach them remain intact. Yet, despite this brilliant mind, he is unable to care for himself because of the memory loss and requires a full time Housekeeper to assist him at home. His sister would rather that he not have a housekeeper, however, because she believes that she can care for him herself. She does not exhibit any love toward her brother and makes his condition out to be worse than it is so that no person is willing to fill the position.

It takes a special person to care for those with memory loss. I have seen that first hand in my life. The Housekeeper is a single mother. She is the first Housekeeper who stayed with the Professor for more than one day because she overlooked his 80 minute memory loop. Rather, she embraced learning abstract mathematical concepts such as amicable numbers, perfect numbers, and the professor's love for prime numbers. When he finds out that she is a working mother, he insists that she brings her son to work. What ensues is a touching relationship between the Professor and ten year old Root. Ogawa is able to bridge the gap between the most unlikely of friends by writing about numbers as the universal language. The Professor says that G-D made numbers before people, and the proofs were always there waiting to be discovered. She inserts actual mathematical proofs rather than writing about them, which both speeds up the novel, and allows the Housekeeper to know the Professor on his level.

This gap is also bridged by Root and the Professor's shared love of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team. As a multigenerational fan of the same team, I have seen first hand how baseball is more than a game but a love shared by families. This is evident as the professor fixes his radio so that Root can listen to games, and together they follow the Tigers on their drive toward the pennant. Because baseball is a game of numbers, Ogawa includes statistics and probability in order to show that the Professor loves the game as much as children do. What touched me the most coincidentally is the Professor's love of the number 28 because to him it is a perfect number that was worn by his favorite Tigers' pitcher in the days when his memory was lucid enough to remember him pitching a no hitter. Today, our favorite Cubs' pitcher wears number 28. He is a control pitcher who is capable of pitching a no hitter every time out and attended Dartmouth of the Ivy League. His nickname: The Professor.

Being a mother of a boy close in age to Root who loves both baseball and math as well as one who has seen older family members succumb to memory loss, I felt like I could relate to the characters in this story. In her last years, my grandmother could not remember how old I was or how many kids I had or that I had kids at all, but if I mentioned Ernie Banks, her eyes lit up. Thus, I was moved by the relationship of the three characters in this slim novel, and enjoyed trying to solve the math proofs along with the housekeeper and hoped upon hope that the professor's dementia would improve even though from experience I knew it would not. Ogawa is a new author for me, and I thoroughly enjoyed this story that brings together an untraditional family who is drawn to the beauty of the numbers of baseball.

5 star ⚾️ 👨‍🏫 🔢 🇯🇵 read