The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

 I feel like I have unintentionally fallen into the world of Japanese literature and I can't get out. I've recently read A Tale for the Time Being, Convenience Store Woman, and Tokyo Ueno Station and have fond feelings about all of them, what with their melancholy, haunting qualities.  It was not a surprise that when I read the excerpt of The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder), I was immediately hooked.  

A mathematics professor gets into a car accident and his memory is only 80 minutes long.  A housekeeper is hired to care for him and she and her son become friends with the man. It's a lovely celebration of found family and mathematics.  A brief 180 pages, this book is an endearing look at the connections that bind us all. It's charming and lovely.

I often think of Japan as a land of declining birth rates, high suicide rates, overworked employees, and lenient criminal justice sentences, not to mention gross depictions of women in anime. So, overall, my impression of Japanese culture is pretty bleak, so it didn't surprise me that the portrayals of the world in Convenience Store Woman, A Tale for the Time Being, and Tokyo Ueno Station were heartrendingly spare and melancholy.  It was an utter delight and shock to me that this book was so charmingly upbeat. There's actually a lot of conflict in it, but everything is wrapped up quickly and lovingly by the end.  If you need a shot of light in you reading diet, this might be for you.  

There's also a tremendous amount of love for mathematics in the pages of this book. As a girl who would like nothing more than to sit down and solve a series of equations for you, this book spoke my language.  There's nothing like a book that pays homage to your interests this directly.

Lines of note:

"The professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one." (page 2)

Doesn't he sound like an awesome teacher?

"I wondered why ordinary words seemed so exotic when they were used in relation to numbers. Amicable numbers or twin primes had a precise quality about them, and yet they sounded as though they'd been taken straight out of a poem.  In my mind, the twins had matching outfits and stood holding hands as they waited in the number line." (page 63)

"He would vanish into the study as through he were literally retreating into his mind, and I imagined that his body might actually vaporize into pure contemplation and disappear." (page 132)

If you've ever lived with someone who really, really gets into their work, this might speak to you.

Mathematical concepts that come up:

Amicable numbers (page 19): Two numbers in which the sum of each of its proper divisors (a positive factor of the number other than the number itself) is equal to the other number.  For example:

The divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 44, 55, and 110. If you add these numbers you get 284.

The divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, and 142. If you add these numbers you get 220.

Therefore, 220 and 284 are amicable numbers.

Perfect number (page 44): A number in which the sum of its proper divisors is equal to itself.  For example:

The divisors of 6 are 1, 2, and 3 and 1+2+3 = 6, so 6 is a perfect number.

Twin prime (pages 61-62): A prime number that is 2 more or 2 less than another prime number.  A twin pair is 3 and 5 or 41 and 43.  

Mersenne prime (pages 61-62): A prime number that is one less than a power of two. Mn = 2^n - 1.  So, in this equation, n must be a prime number because if it's composite, there will obviously be a divisor.  3, 7, 31 are the smallest Mersenne primes (3 = 2^2 - 1, 7 = 2^3 - 1, 31 = 2^5 - 1).