He is a brilliant math professor, with a peculiar problem--since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only 80 minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young housekeeper with a 10-year-old son who is hired to care for the professor. Between them, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms.

Reviews

*A "New York Times Book Review " Editors' Choice Selection*

"Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching."--Paul Auster

"Gorgeous, cinematic . . . "The Housekeeper and the Professor" is a perfectly sustained novel . . . like a note prolonged, a fermata, a pause enabling us to peer intently into the lives of its characters. . . . This novel has all the charm and restraint of any by Ishiguro or Kenzaburo Oe and the whimsy of Murakami. The three lives connect like the vertices of a triangle."--Susan Salter Reynolds, "Los Angeles"" Times"

"Deceptively elegant . . . This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water. But even in the clearest waters can lurk currents you don't see until you are in them. Dive into Yoko Ogawa's world . . . and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen."--Dennis Overbye, "The New York Times Book Review"

"Alive with mysteries both mathematical and personal, "The Housekeeper and the Professor" has the pared-down elegance of an equation."--"O, The Oprah Magazine"

"This sweetly melancholy novel adheres to the Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty in what is off-center, imperfect. . . . In treating one another with such warm concern and respect, the characters implicitly tell us something about the unforgiving society on the other side of the professor's cottage door. "The Housekeeper and the Professor" is a wisp of a book, but an affecting one."--Amanda Heller, "The Boston Globe"

"We don't pay much attention to literary news from Japan unless it's bizarre: businessmen on crowded subways reading pornographic manga, teenage girls buying cell-phone romance novels by the millions. But here's an example of Japanese reading habits that's just as odd, if less sexy: Yoko Ogawa's "The Housekeeper and the Professor" has sold more than 2.5 million copies in the small island nation. Oprah would have to recommen