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The Housekeeper and the Professor
Brief Description
Yoko Ogawa's 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. He is a brilliant math professor with a peculiar problem—ever since a traumatic head injury, he...
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The Housekeeper and the Professor
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See moreFrom one of Japan's most beloved bestselling authors, Yoko Ogawa, comes an achingly beautiful story about family, memory, and math.
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Description
Yoko Ogawa's 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.
He is a brilliant math professor with a peculiar problem—ever 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 to care for him.
Every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor's mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. The numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son.
The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities—like the Housekeeper's shoe size—and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781250375971
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 01 July 2025
Country: United States
Imprint: St Martin's Press
Contributors:
- Translated by Stephen Snyder
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 15.0mm
Width: 137.0mm
Height: 211.0mm
Weight: 159g
Pages: 192
Collections
About the Author
Yoko Ogawa's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and she has won Japan's most prestigious literary awards. Her books include The Housekeeper and the Professor, Revenge, and The Diving Pool.
Stephen Snyder teaches Japanese literature at Middlebury College. His translations include works by Kenzaburō Ōe, Ryu Murakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Miri Yu.
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The Housekeeper and the Professor
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family. He is a brilliant math professor with a peculiar problem—ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute...PaperbackSold Out -
The Housekeeper and the Professor
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. He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem — ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is...PaperbackSold Out -
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