A Beautiful Equation

Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper & the Professor (otherwise entitled in Japan as The Professor's Beautiful Equation) is an original, simple, lovely story about the relevance of memory and the redefinition of family.  As the title references, the story involves an uneducated single mother who keeps house for a former Professor and math genius whose memory stops in 1975 and whose new memories last an exact 80 minutes.  As one might imagine, this creates for an interesting, if not redundant, relationship between the two.  Each morning when the housekeeper arrives, the two engage in similar, if not identical, conversations and series of events.  And after every 80 minute period of time passes, everything begins anew.  Fortunately, the Professor keeps post-it notes attached to his suit to help act as his memory.  (The housekeeper need only point to the note with her image--a stick figure-like sketch--with the words "the new housekeeper".)  What the title fails to mention is a third, crucial character:  the housekeeper's son, whom the Professor grows to teach and protect and share his love of baseball.  What develops is an ironic relationship between the three:  a family of strangers without the potential to develop their relationship.

Plot-wise, not much happens in The Housekeeper & the Professor, but that doesn't matter:  what's paramount are the characters themselves, whose unusual relationship easily maintains the readers' interest on its own.