How do you live without short-term memory?

I believe that when this was published in Japan in 2003, the trope of the character who cannot remember anything for longer than eighty minutes was new. That’s the elderly professor of this short novel’s title. 

The housekeeper is—what else?—the professor’s housekeeper. We never learn his name, her name, or the name of her ten-year-old son called “Root” because with his flat-top haircut he resembles, to the professor, the sign for square root. She narrates the story.

The professor lost his memory in an automobile accident. He had been a world-class mathematician, specializing in number theory and the novel offers a few, understandable examples of the kinds of problems he was working with. He can still do some mathematics and one diversion is solving problems in a mathematical journal.

He cannot, however, recall anything else, anything new for more than eighty minutes. Every day when the housekeeper arrives, she has to introduce herself anew. He compensates slightly by writing notes to himself and pinning them to his suit.

Given the strain of keeping house for such a client, the agency has had a problem providing a reliable person who can cook lunch, clean the house, shop, make dinner, and not be flustered by the professor’s condition. The narrator, who is an unmarried woman in her late twenties, needs the work and has essentially been keeping house for her unmarried mother for years. 

When the professor learns that his housekeeper has a ten-year-old son—a latch-key child—he insists that the boy come to the house rather than returning to the empty apartment. They form a kind of family: Grandfather, mother, son. She writes:

“Root had never enjoyed dinner as much as he did when we ate with the Professor. He answered the Professors questions and let him fill his plate to overflowing, and whenever he could, he looked curiously around the room or stole a glance at the notes on the Professor’s suit.” The idyll cannot last, but by this point in the book we are invested in the characters.

According to an interview in the UK’s Independent Ogawa wrote for herself growing up. She married a steel company engineer, quit her job as a medical university secretary, and wrote. She didn’t intentionally keep it secret, but her husband learned about her writing only when her debut novel, The Breaking of the Butterfly, received a literary prize. “I wasn’t telling anyone in a big voice, ‘I’m writing a novel,’” she says. “But I always thought, no matter how my life changes, I want to have a life of writing. Whether I could make any money off it, I did not know.”

She had a son, and her novella Pregnancy Diary won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and she continued to write. “I would change a diaper and then write a sentence. Then I’d make a meal and write a sentence. Now that my son has grown, I feel like I was at my happiest when I was writing while raising my child. Now that I can write as much as I want 24 hours a day, it’s not as if I produce any greater work now than I did in the past.” Ogawa achieved bestseller status and a film adaptation with The Professor and the Housekeeper.

Her translator Stephen Snyder who is a professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College, says Ogawa’s novels relate to Japanese culture in “ancillary ways.” Though she raises socially relevant themes, he says, she is never doctrinaire. “There is a naturalness to what she writes so it never feels forced. Her narrative seems to be flowing from a source that’s hard to identify.”

The Professor and the Housekeeper is an interesting depiction of three lives. (I almost wrote “of three Japanese lives” but it is more universal than that) and ultimately moving.