Ron Nyren on Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor
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(Guest post by Ron Nyren)
My father had an uncanny ability to manage numbers. He could add long strings of them in his head, as well as multiply and divide sizable figures without writing them down, skills that served him well in keeping the books for the family business, Nyren Brothers Florists, then later as troubleshooter for a wholesale florist, and finally as a real estate agent before he retired. He also served as treasurer for the church, the town’s garden club, and just about every other organization he belonged to. In his last few years, in his late 80s, when his short-term memory began to fail him, he patiently taught my mother to take over balancing the checkbook.
Although I didn’t inherit his mathematical abilities, I did fall in love with calculus in high school. I even took advanced calculus in my first semester of college, convincing myself that although I was likely to be an English major, I could just as well choose math. I worried about staying awake for a 9:00 a.m. class, but our professor, a short, skinny, irascible man with spectacles and a French accent, would fling a piece of chalk at any student whose attention flagged. He told us about the copious letters to the editor he wrote, in which he pointed out sloppy or specious uses of mathematics in newspapers and magazines—for each of his battles, he assembled extensive documentation in what he called a “file.” I struggled in the more arcane reaches of math he attempted to prod us toward, and after a second semester with another instructor, who lectured on the matrix representation of linear equations in a sleepy monotone, I was relieved to leave the subject behind.
The titular professor of Yoko Ogawa’s wonderful novel The Housekeeper and the Professor is the kind of math teacher one would most hope for—gentle and affirming rather than scolding, delighted to share the wonder of numbers and the orderly way they encompass the universe. The narrator, an unnamed housekeeper hired to clean the professor’s house, learns that he has only 80 minutes of short-term memory, the result of a car accident 17 years ago. Although he clips notes to his suit jacket to remind him of what he cannot remember, she must reintroduce herself to him every day, whereupon he always asks her shoe size or telephone number and then notes some numerical significance it possesses. They develop a rapport as his enthusiasm for whole math catches her imagination, and he bonds with her 10-year-old son, whom he affectionately nicknames “Root” after the flat top of the boy’s head—reminiscent, he says, of the square root sign.
In turn, the housekeeper and her son try to figure out the mystery of the professor—why he is so estranged from his sister-in-law, who hired the housekeeper; why he grows so fiercely protective whenever he perceives Root’s safety to be in danger. About two-thirds of the way through the novel, after a trip to a baseball game, the professor comes down with fever, and the housekeeper and her son stay over to care for him. When he wakes up, she is startled to hear the professor sobbing:
The Professor was reading the note clipped in the most prominent spot on his jacket, the one he could never avoid seeing as he got dressed. "My memory lasts only eighty minutes." I sat down on the edge of the bed, unsure whether there was anything more I could do for him. My mistake had been the simplest one—and perhaps the most fatal. Every morning, when the Professor woke up, a note in his own hand reminded him of his affliction, and that the dreams he'd dreamed were not last night's but those of some night in the distant past back when his memory had ended—it was as though yesterday had never happened. The Professor who had shielded Root from the foul ball last night was gone. Somehow, I had never quite understood what it meant for him to wake up alone each morning to this cruel revelation.
The suit jacket covered with notes has been a memorable image all along, and sometimes a comic one, as when the housekeeper coaxes the professor to leave the house to go to the barbershop, and he draws stares from passersby. But here, this pragmatic if unusual workaround comes to have a tragic resonance, as the housekeeper realizes he endures this “cruel revelation” every time he wakes. The notes—which include the professor’s own sketch of the housekeeper’s face under the words “the new housekeeper”—can hardly compensate for 17 years of lost memories, or the awareness that the future ahead contains years of memories that will never stick.
Throughout the book, Ogawa grounds us with physical details in a beautiful, understated way, even as the professor bonds with the housekeeper and her son through the wonder and mystery of such abstruse topics as prime numbers, Artin’s conjecture, and the famed equation known as Euler’s formula.
In my novel, The Book of Lost Light, Joseph tells the story of growing up with his obsessive photographer father, Arthur, and impulsive young cousin, Karelia. A former protégé of Eadweard Muybridge, Arthur hopes to make a grand contribution to the understanding of the nature of time. When the 1906 earthquake upends everything, the family finds ways to rebuild their lives among a group of artist refugees in Berkeley. Here, Joseph remembers growing up amidst photographs his father took of his mother before she died in childbirth, imperfect mementos of treasured memory:
My father hung photographs of my mother on the walls of every apartment we lived in. My mother concealing her mouth with a paper fan; my mother wielding a fireplace shovel in a fencer’s stance; my mother striding, in three successive images, across a room; my mother gazing dolefully up from a book as if resigned to being photographed. She almost never gave my father a straight face. For that he had had to catch her unaware by tying Bloch’s Detective Photo Scarf around his neck, the lens protruding through the fabric in cunning imitation of a stickpin. In the resulting images, grainy and dark, her features are not composed for effect or animated by her will. She is waiting for a streetcar, she is holding onto her hat in the wind, she is mortal.
As a writer, I’m fascinated by the inventiveness of our efforts to contend with the fragility and messiness of life, to capture the uncapturable, trying to keep the elusive past alive with all our notes, photographs, documents, memories, and stories.
Ron Nyren’s novel The Book of Lost Light won Black Lawrence Press’s 2019 Big Moose Prize and is forthcoming in November 2020. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Mississippi Review, Fourteen Hills, Able Muse, Dalhousie Review, and 100 Word Story, among others, and his stories have been shortlisted for the O. Henry Awards and the Pushcart Prize. His writing about architecture, urban design, and sustainability has appeared in Urban Land, Interior Design, Metropolis, Contract, and EcoStructure. He is the coauthor, with Sarah Stone, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers, and a former editor of Furious Fictions: The Magazine of Short-Short Stories. Ron earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. He is the recipient of a major Hopwood award, the Farrar Prize in Playwriting, the Roy W. Cowden Memorial Fellowship, and the Andrea Beauchamp prize in short fiction. A former Stegner Fellow, he is an instructor in fiction writing for Stanford Continuing Studies.
Find out more at www.ronnyren.com.