However, having said that, Ogawa has done a good job in presenting the sport to me in a bearable manner. Baseball is a sport full of statistics, so it seems. I love almost every bit of the book except baseball. For those who are familiar to Japanese movies or drama series, how this story develops and ends should come as no surprise.

And there is the agency that the housekeeper works in. She lives nearby but seldom appears in his life. Beyond the relationship of the three, there is this professor’s mysterious sister-in-law who engages the housekeeping service on behalf of the professor. Soon, upon the professor’s request (and he seems to have the same request every time his memory is erased), the housekeeper’s son should be with his mother after school instead of staying alone at home.

The housekeeper, on the other hand, does not mind the repeated lessons because she left school when young. The professor then further explains to the housekeeper the beauty of prime numbers, the rarity of twin primes, the alternative means in arriving to the same, and mathematics is indeed the notebooks of God (I have heard this association from one of my friends who studied mathematics in university). And since the numbers are ‘amicable’, so should the relationship between the two. To explain, say, the unique characteristic of ‘amicable numbers’ – a pair of numbers that the sums of their factors equal to each other (such as 220 and 284), the author makes use of the housekeeper’s birthday (Feb 20) and the prize number as engraved onto the professor’s watch (any other means the professor would have forgotten). It is beautiful because seldom have I come across a novel with so much mathematics within and yet, engaging. It is a beautiful story because it is a story of memory and relationship down to very daily routines.

“The Housekeeper and the Professor” tells a beautiful story between a professor who only has 80 minutes worth of short-term memory due to an accident, a young housekeeper who has been a single mother since 18, and her son whom the mathematic professor has nicknamed as Root because his hairstyle reminds the professor of the square root symbol.

La formula del professore by Yōko Ogawa