The Housekeeper and the Professor
By Yōko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (Translator)
Publication Year: 2009 (first published in Japanese in 2003)
Type: Fiction
Genre: contemporary
Read on 2018-07-10
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2018 Reading Survey ➞
★★★★★
“Our last visit to the Professor was in the autumn of the year Root turned twenty-two.”
This is the line that brought me to tears. I read this book over the course of a day, mostly on my very mundane commute to and from work after a final weekend with my family before they flew back to Shanghai. In spite of the unglamorous reading conditions, this story transported me completely into a space and feeling of pure sublime. It is as near as I can imagine a piece of literature may ever get to approaching the sublime and capturing the ineffable.
The aged Professor, who as a result of an old injury has a memory of eighty minutes, inspires the unnamed housekeeper and her son, nicknamed Root, to see the perfect, vast, and ordinary beauty of numbers. The housekeeper, who narrates this story, is repeatedly struck by the sheer, almost impossible perfection of numbers that she encounters everyday, numbers which the Professor teases out of their worldly, mundane functions to express something divine. The relationship between 218 and 284 - casual, coincidental, incidental - somehow manages to encapsulate the beautiful relationship that develops, time and time again, between the Professor, the housekeeper, and her son.
This quote, on the second last page of the book, felt like exactly this sort of encounter. As I write this, I am just turned twenty-two and facing (in many ways) the autumn of my twenty-second year. Root reminded me of my little brother from the beginning, but I only realized a few pages earlier the resonance the Professor had with my grandfather who was a high school math teacher. The revelation that Root also becomes a high school math teacher closed this perfect circle - a complete, mathematical proof that my picking up this book is entirely coincidental and yet absolutely fated. A perfect, precious, ineffable moment, that may be described just as well by all of these words as simply, 22.
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