The Housekeeper and the Professor

"My memory lasts only eighty minutes"

What if every morning you wake up and find this thought clipped on your clothes? How would you accept it or react on this fact? This is the question that the Housekeeper cannot even imagine answering. This is also where the story of this novel revolves. As part of the "Japanese Invasion" in my bookshelf, I got myself a copy of The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa despite of it costing more than Php 600 for only 180 pages of readings. Now, before I take you to a deeper look of the novel, please give me the pleasure of gushing about the novel's cover. According to the World Wide Web, the copy that I have is the 2009 edition. And I cannot help but admire the cover of this novel because it is sooo dreamy. I simply love it! It exudes an intense emotion, a little melancholic perhaps, touching, and also calming. It was just perfect for the story that it will eventually reveal.

The first two pages took my breath away. I loved how Ogawa wrote it; she made me feel like I am personally with the Professor and the Housekeeper, listening to the Professor's "lecture". The succeeding few pages made me laughed and it is because how Ogawa drops the lines. She has a lot of humor going on and she delivers it perfectly. Generally, Yoko Ogawa has managed to provoke each of my emotions through out this whole novel. I laughed, felt sad, confused, sympathetic, irritated, helpless, touched, informed, learned, regretful, and again, sad. Although the ending was quite sad, Ogawa skipped the melodrama (Japanese  people strike me as non-melodramatics), but was able to convey the sadness effectively. Whenever I thought I would cry, Ogawa's words would uplift me as if calming me down. It is as if she is assuring me that everything will be alright. That everything is part of life, which it really is and that makes this novel very real. It also amazes me that this novel has so many baseball facts that I cannot help but wonder if Ogawa really is a baseball fan. Based also to the extensive discussions about Mathematics, I wonder if she is also a Mathematician or she got her ideas from a Mathematician (she co-wrote another story with one). And for these two "lectures", she has impressed me.

As Ogawa has made me feel like I am a part of the everyday living of the characters, I find the Professor a comfort to me too. So when he was to live somewhere else, I got sad also. I find the Professor very loving, lovable, and at times funny. I was also pitiful of him that there are times that I just want to pull him out of the eighty-minute frame so that he can live a normal life. Root on the other hand has portrayed a certain level of maturity for a child of 10. He has been mature about and towards the Professor. As for the real relationship of the Professor to his sister-in-law, as much as I want to know more about it, I appreciated that Ogawa did not dwell much more about this. It gave the story another level of reality.

I love how Yoko Ogawa wrote this novel. Although there are times that I am about to feel bored (baseball stuff and the Math), Ogawa, or rather the Professor always comes to my rescue. I finished the novel in less than 24 hours and although it is just 180 pages, do not also forget that it includes Math and baseball discussions. These are two things that I would not bother to read for mere pleasure except of course if the Professor is a part of these.