Casting a spell over memory and emotion

FICTION: The Housekeeper + The Professor By Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder Harvill Secker, 180pp, £11.99

THE PROFESSOR is a brilliant mathematician; he has lived his life through the beauty of numbers. Now numbers are all he has.

Having suffered severe head injuries in a car accident, he no longer has a memory; he can only remember what happened during the previous eighty minutes.

His is a terrible dilemma. For the young housekeeper, the narrator of this beautiful story, every problem may be dealt with. A single mother who works for an agency specialising in home help, she is the tenth housekeeper to arrive at the professor’s little house which stands a short distance from a larger one in which his widowed sister-in-law lives.

Yet again the extraordinary Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa casts her spell. Never before has the beauty of maths been so lovingly explored. The young housekeeper, herself the daughter of a woman who consistently idealised the man who had abandoned them, says “the image I have of my father is that of a statue in a museum. No matter how close I come to him, I can’t get his attention, he continues to stare off into the distance without looking down, and he never reaches out his hand to me.”

This is a tender, gentle book, very different from the dazzlingly surrealist tales in The Diving Poolwhich was first published in English last year. Ogawa is an original and establishes a world in a paragraph. The trio of stories in The Diving Poolpresent narrators engaged in the role of witness, each is attempting to make sense of very different situations. Throughout that wonderful collection Ogawa made inspired use of elements of the European fairytale. The housekeeper in the new book is not trying to make sense; she just wants to make everything work as well as possible. She is a candid, practical woman who quickly becomes engaged by numbers. It is the language through which the professor converses.

Each morning she must go through the ritual of introducing herself all over again to the professor. No matter how close they have come the previous day, he will have forgotten everything, including her by the time she next arrives. Each morning she answers the same question about her shoe size. Without attempting to present herself as a hero, the narrator obviously is heroic, she is patient and kind. Ogawa is so skilful that there is no sentimentality, no forced platitudes. The young woman simply explains how she too became interested in the perfect number. When her 10-year-old son joins the little world created by the housekeeper and the professor, the old man gives the boy a nickname, Root, inspired by the shape of his head which reminds the professor of the symbol for the square root.

Root has a passion, baseball, and he begins to share this with the professor who is also devoted to the game but in his case to the players of an earlier generation whom he assumes to be still playing. The woman and her son learn how to live in the present with the professor. It is innocent and well intentioned. Eventually the housekeeper arranges for them all to go to a baseball game. In doing so, she realises: “Root had never been to a ball game. In fact, with the exception of a trip to the zoo with his grandmother, he had never been to a museum or a movie theater or anywhere at all. From the time he was born, I had been obsessed with making ends meet, and somehow I had forgotten to make time to have fun with my son.”

Although the housekeeper has worked hard at understanding the professor, it is the boy who quickly forges a rapport with him. The professor appears to wake from his preoccupation with numbers to see Root as a person to care for. All of this is told in the calm, reflective voice of the narrator. There are problems along the way when the professor falls ill and the housekeeper, forbidden to contact her employer, the old man’s sister-in-law, stays the night, and is dismissed. Mother and son lose their world and their friend. The narrator’s fatalistic acceptance of this is quietly conveyed. But she is summoned to return to work because Root has been caught visiting the professor. Later there is a heartbreaking sequence when a birthday party is threatened by the accidental damage done to the birthday cake.

Ogawa succeeds in balancing the sophistication and simplicity. This is a tale which will leave the reader gasping. It is as if an extremely clever French writer were to suddenly acquire the humanity and humility to match his or her intellectual drive. Paul Auster's endorsement of the book is not surprising as the narrative tone is reminiscent of that used by him in his 1980s City of Glasstrilogy although Ogawa in this book is less cryptic, her narrator less self absorbed.

Yet the housekeeper is also a bit of a detective in her own quietly tenacious way as she pieces together the professor’s past. An interestingly ambivalent aura also surrounds the elderly sister-in-law who had also been in the car crash which destroyed the professor’s memory. She had been left with a crippled leg.

As a way of prodding his memory the professor keeps a collection of notes pinned to his suit. The housekeeper diligently replaces them as they become crumpled and torn. There is nothing subservient in her care of him, it is gentle and loving. The job has also opened her imagination to the beauty of numbers.

She is grateful for what she has learnt. “I remembered something the Professor had told me, something a mathematician with a difficult name once said: ‘Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction: but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it.’” Elsewhere she recalls finding a dead fawn one day when she and Root were visiting her mother’s grave. “We prayed longer that day for the fawn than we did for my mother’s soul. We prayed that the tiny life could go with her on her journey.”

With the publication in English of The Diving Pool in 2008, some 18 years after it first appeared in Japan, Western readers discovered yet another gifted Asian writer. The Housekeeper + The Professorwas published in Japan in 2003. The time lapse between translation is closing. Hopefully more of Yoko Ogawa's exciting, thoughtful fiction is heading our way.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times