Book Summary
The Housekeeper and the Professor is a work of literary fiction set in modern-day Japan. In March 1992, Akebono assigns the narrator to work for a former mathematics professor named Root. The Professor has been through several housekeepers and is unable to recall anything from more than 80 minutes ago. Despite the Professor’s idiosyncrasies, the narrator finds the task uncomplicated in comparison to her prior assignments. When the Professor completes his current mathematical problem, he relaxes and becomes nicer. One day, he discovers the narrator has a little son, Root, whom he names after the flat top of his head.
Root and the Professor get close, bonding over their love of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team, despite the Professor’s belief that it is 1975 and his favorite pitcher, Yutaka Enatsu, is still on the team. The Professor’s concern for and patience with Root earns the narrator’s great trust and regard, and the two spend hours discussing number theory.
In June, the narrator decides to take the Professor and Root to a baseball game, as neither had ever seen one in person. Unfortunately, the Professor develops a fever following the game, and the narrator goes above and above her usual duty to care for him until he recovers. Shortly after his recovery, she receives word from the agency that she has been reassigned at the widow’s request.
The narrator goes to work for another couple, two tax experts, who require her to work long hours and frequently blur the borders between her job and their business. Her association with the Professor has a significant impact on her, and she always brings a pencil and paper with her to examine intriguing figures.
In the fall, the Professor wins a significant mathematics prize, and the narrator decides to throw a little party to both the award and Root’s forthcoming birthday. The widow notifies the narrator that the Professor will be admitted to a long-term care home, and the narrator is concerned that she has done something wrong again.
The narrator and Root spend years visiting the Professor at the facility before he passes away. They play baseball in college until he is wounded, and after graduation, he passes his examinations to become a middle school math teacher, much to the Professor’s delight.
Chapter 1 Summary
The Housekeeper is a novel about the nature of memory and how it affects the narrator. The story is set in 1992, during the narrator’s brief stint working for the Professor, and occasionally jumps ahead to the year 2003. The Professor’s forgetfulness distorts our concept of memory, and the narrator remains rooted in their year together, 1992, reverting to small, poignant moments as a coping method.
The novel emphasizes the significance of memory and the Professor’s note system, which enables him to transmit his long-term memory from his mind to the outside of his jacket. This emphasis on only what is vital parallels the novel’s intended lack of specificity, since the narrator does not address herself, her son, or the Professor by name. Except for the Tigers’ match against Hiroshima, a city that suffered its own form of destroyed memory after the US detonated an atomic bomb on it in WWII, the rest of the world is mostly irrelevant.
The chapters contain several foreshadowing moments, such as the Professor’s ability to retain a memory for exactly 80 minutes, and the Professor’s sister-in-law’s stringent limits and silent oversight, which build up the narrator’s eventual battle with the widow. The Professor’s peculiarities include a passion for children and a conviction in their protection. The novel’s central theme is Root’s connection with the Professor, but the episode with the girl in the sandbox in Chapter 3 highlights the Professor’s isolation from society. The narrator, who sees only kindness in the Professor’s acts, is clearly at conflict with society.
Chapter 2 Summary
Although the narrator states that the Professor is a talented educator at the beginning of the story, this is expanded upon in this part when the Professor explains patterns within prime numbers. It’s important to note that the Professor is educating both Root and the narrator—the narrator is amazed by the Professor’s patience with Root, but throughout the narrative, we witness his patience with the narrator, as well as the influence it has on her. The Professor instills a fresh passion of mathematics in the narrator, who has never gotten a higher education and has always thought she despised arithmetic.
The Professor’s open-mindedness and lack of pretension play a critical role. Despite his genius, he has no contempt for Root or the narrator; he simply enjoys numbers and wants to share that passion with others, explaining both high-level and fundamental mathematics with amazement and joy. Furthermore, the Professor is humble—the narrator admires his ability to admit when he doesn’t know something mathematical, and he’s open about his many inadequacies outside of mathematics. In his opinion, everyone has something to learn, but only if they admit they don’t know it first.
The baseball game creates internal and external problems. The first is the narrator’s decision to purchase the tickets, which she makes without considering the potential problems posed by the Professor’s impaired recall. As Root points out, not only would getting the Professor to the game be difficult, but there are possible hazards in the game itself because the Professor believes the year is 1975. Even though everything works out, the episode highlights how much the Professor’s accident has isolated him from the outside world.
In addition, the game initiates the chain of events that leads to the narrator’s firing. The widow has cast a dark shadow on the novel’s events. When the Professor develops a fever, the narrator must choose between breaking the widow’s regulations by contacting her and breaking the agency’s rules by staying the night. In the end, she accepts the burden of caring for the Professor, but she loses her career in the process.
The game is important in other ways as well. Until now, the Professor had only known baseball through numbers—even when he was younger, he had never heard or seen his favorite Tigers play, and was unaware that you could listen to or watch a baseball game. The Professor sees the world in a peculiar way—his one pleasure outside of numbers is baseball, but even that appears to be due to the nature of baseball, in which statistics play an especially prominent role. (Not many other hobbies can be enjoyed just through statistics.) However, sharing the game with the narrator’s family adds another layer of connection between the Professor and Root, as it is their first game together.
Finally, the game helps the narrator understand how much she has unintentionally denied Root by focusing solely on her own profession.
The Professor’s puzzle-solving and pattern-finding abilities demonstrated in the section confound the nature of his memory. He has already demonstrated an aptitude for numbers, but his ability to manipulate words demonstrates a feel for language that is linked to memory and mathematics; similarly, his ability to predict where the evening star will appear in the night sky is an instinctual, incremental form of memory that continues to evolve from one evening to the next.
Chapter 3 Summary
The novel delves at the impact of a Professor on the narrator and her son, with an emphasis on the narrator’s career and their relationship. The narrator studies statistics while working for her new clients, which provides her pleasure but also strains her relationship with her son Root. The Professor explains the significance of the number zero, which restores order to the universe, despite the Greeks’ notion that zero would break the principles of arithmetic. The Professor expresses the narrator and Root as one of the Professor’s intricate irrationality through arithmetic, which the widow understands.
The relationship between the Professor and the widow is further examined, with the narrator learning that the widow was in the automobile during the Professor’s accident and that the Professor keeps a photograph of himself and the widow in his thesis. This suggests more about their relationship than meets the eye, but the author never explains it.
The cookie tin enhances the Professor’s memory by acting as a “tomb” for his long-term recollections, as opposed to the notes on his jacket, which externalize his short-term memory. The novel emphasizes the complexities of the Professor and the widow’s relationship, as well as the possibility of future conflict in the plot.
Chapter 4 Summary
The celebration highlights several of the novel’s elements, such as the Professor’s affection for the Tigers, his protective sentiments for Root, and his ability to recognize the evening star. In a surprising turn of events, we learn that the widow purposely permitted them to celebrate so that they may unwittingly say goodbye to him—she didn’t tell them this, but it’s still a stark contrast to her prior suspicious and unpleasant demeanor. The widow is no longer envious of the narrator’s involvement in the Professor’s life; as she points out, the Professor will always remember her, even though he cannot recall either Root or the narrator.
Nonetheless, we observe the Professor’s impact on the narrator and Root, as well as theirs on him. His countless notes are replaced by the Enatsu card, which becomes the most crucial thing for him to remember. Furthermore, the widow transforms the card into a necklace for him, emphasizing her newfound admiration for Root and the narrator.