The Housekeeper and The Professor

By Yoko Ogawa

This fictional story that contains a partly-negative way of life in japan. However, the main point of the story is not about the society itself, but actually about a professor. The backstory is that the Professor was involved in a car accident that killed his parents, and also severed his nerves in a way that made him unable to make memories from that point onwards, in other words, he is stuck in his 30 year old mind, every dream being a repeat of that decades ago, as his memory lasts only a mere 80 minutes, before he forgets everything that happened before that. The housekeeper(who's perspective you see), arrives daily, but to the professor, it'll always feel like its the housekeeper's first day, and hence adds her to his list of many notes he tags to his coat as reminder to him so that when he wakes up everyday, he'll be able to know what happened that will affect him.

They grow closer everyday, and the housekeeper's illegitimate son also grows to love the company of the professor, but after going out to watch a baseball game as a group, the professor(who hates crowds) got a fever lasting three days, and the housekeeper had to stay overnight to take care of him. But the Professor sister-in-law(who doesn't like company) makes a complaint, and the housekeeper is fired. Now working in other people's houses, breezing through the process of hiring and firing, she is only half-heartedly working as she knows that the professor would have already forgotten about her at all.

Now she keeps remembering of past memories about the Professor, including all the times he patiently taught her easier ways of learning math. And she is able to keep asking questions again without the Professor being frustrated as the Professor would forget about it after 80 minutes. But later on, the sister-in-law accepts the housekeeper and her son after seeing the Professor writing down Euler's Formula, making the sister-in-law change her mind.

At the end of the novel, the housekeeper finds a tin of old photos, including that of the Professor and his sister-in-law, which hint that they once had romantic feelings for each other.

This book is very dense and requires quite a amount of time to fully realize how deep the book is. I hope anyone reading this book will have fun and be able to remember the significance of making good memories while we still can and have a fulfilling life.