the housekeeper and the professor by yōko ogawa

The next day, her son comes and the Professor nicknames him 'Root'. One day, upon learning that she has a 10-year-old son waiting home alone until late at night every day, the Professor flies into a rage and tells the narrator to have her son come to his home directly from school from that day on. She is more than a little frustrated to find that he loves only mathematics and shows no interest whatsoever in anything or anyone else. The narrator's housekeeping agency dispatches her to the house of the Professor, a former mathematician who can remember new memories for only 80 minutes. The novel received the Hon'ya Taisho award, was adapted into a film version in January 2006, and after being published in paperback in December 2005, sold one million copies in two months, faster than any other Shinchosha paperback. It has been said that Erdős was used as a model for the Professor. The novel's bibliography lists the book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a biography of the mathematician Paul Erdős. The story centers around a mathematician, 'the Professor,' who suffered brain damage in a traffic accident in 1975 and since then can produce only 80 minutes' worth of memories, and his interactions with a housekeeper (the narrator) and her son 'Root' as the Professor shares the beauty of equations with them. In 2009, the English translation by Stephen Snyder was published.

It was published in Japan in August 2003, by Shinchosha. The Housekeeper and the Professor ( 博士の愛した数式, hakase no ai shita suushiki ) (literally 'The Professor's Beloved Equation') is a novel by Yōko Ogawa set in modern-day Japan.

The housekeeper and the professor by yōko ogawa