* I preface this review by apologising for my recent radio-silence. We are on the road traveling in North America this month, during which time it has been and will no doubt continue to be difficult to get enough consistent access to any computer for me to be able to write and post regularly. I will do what I can, but be assured that regular transmission will resume in the week starting 25 February. *
This is a lovely quiet little book that will sneak up on you, so that your emotional attachment by the end comes as a surprise. At least that's how I experienced it.
Yoko Ogawa is apparently quite prolific. As someone who has little experience reading Japanese fiction (save for some Murakami), I'm very pleased that this particular book has earned Ogawa such international acclaim, so that I was able to hear of it and read it. I first heard about it when it was one of the featured books on my favourite (Australian) book show, ABC's The First Tuesday Book Club. That was several years ago and I was interested in the differing opinions it had sparked: Jennifer Byrne loved it, whilst Marieke Hardy (for whom I have always had a soft spot) likened it to young adult fiction that was also trying to 'trick' her into liking math. Recently I came across another mention of the book on a trawl through Goodreads, and decided on a whim to download it. I was vindicated when, earlier today in Canada, I came across a delightful hard copy edition with an accolade on the front cover by one of my favourite authors, Paul Auster.
The plot is simple. A housekeeper is hired for a new position looking after an elderly math professor with an unusual ailment. After a car accident many years earlier his short-term memory is now restricted to an 80 minute cycle, which reboots automatically as if on a precise timer. The professor has already gone through at least nine previous housekeepers, none of them up to the job of caring for a man who ceases to remember them repeatedly throughout the day.
This housekeeper, however (whose name we never learn), is entranced by the professor and his gentle ways, and develops an unlikely friendship with him. He greets her each day by asking for her birth date or her shoe size, numbers being the one constant that allow him still to organise new information into recognisable patterns. The housekeeper does not mind the repetition and finds his frequent vocalisation of mathematical problems diverting and even enlightening. When the professor finds out the housekeeper has a young son who sits at home by himself after school, waiting for his mother to return from work, he insists that the housekeeper bring her son to his house each day instead. The professor's delight in the boy, and the boy's equivalent respect and admiration for the professor, deepen the friendship between these three characters.
The professor dubs the boy 'Root' because the top of his head is flat like the square root sign - a head 'oddly suited to supporting a hand.' Between math lessons and a shared love of baseball this unlikely pair form a tight bond that is all the more touching given the absence in the boy's life of any other father figure. As time passes it becomes clear that the professor will leave a lasting impression on both the housekeeper and her son, even though, as the professor's sister-in-law poignantly says to the housekeeper towards the end of the book, 'my brother-in-law can never remember you, but he can never forget me.'
The book is small and poetic, in an understated, elegant way. It is reflective of the manners of the Japanese (though I do not profess to be an expert of any kind). Feelings are never directly expressed, so that even when the housekeeper at one stage loses her position through a misunderstanding, she does not stand up for herself in the vocal way that we might expect of a modern-day heroin. Polite ways and means of expression govern the interactions of the characters and this means the book reads like a gently bubbling brook, no cliffhangers or waterfalls or major plot interruptions, just gentle simmering humanity. But it is, at the same time, moving and sad, and memorable.
Overall assessment: 4 out of 5 stars.
Pros / Favourite passage(s): The translator here has done a beautiful job, the writing even as read in English is evocative and quite lovely. Some examples below.
'And yet, the room was filled by a kind of stillness. Not simply an absence of noise, but an accumulation of layers of silence, untouched by fallen hair or mold, silence that the Professor left behind as he wandered through the numbers, silence like a clear lake hidden in the depths of the forest.'
'As I mopped the office floor, my mind churning with worries about Root, I realised how much I needed this eternal truth that the Professor had described. I needed the sense that this invisible world was somehow propping up the visible one, that this one, true line extended indefinitely, without width or area, confidently piercing through the shadows. Somehow, this line would help me find peace.'
Cons: Whilst I certainly don't feel as Marieke did that this book was trying to trick me into liking math, I will confess that I have never been a math aficionado and, although I can appreciate the objective beauty of mathematics, I did occasionally feel while I was reading this that it was enough already, with the endless math. Especially when it was clearly intended to be broken right down so that even dummies would get it but I still couldn't figure it out. But this was a small thing, really, in the context of the story.
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