"More than 2.5 million copies of this gorgeous, cinematic novel have been sold in Japan since its publication in 2003. Yoko Ogawa has published more than 20 books; this is the second to be published in English. The first, The Diving Pool, contained three eerie novellas; critics wondered why she hadn't been translated sooner. The Housekeeper and the Professor is a perfectly sustained novel (a tribute to Stephen Snyder's smooth translation); like a note prolonged, a fermata, a pause enabling us to peer intently into the lives of its characters. The housekeeper is young, with a 10-year-old son who loves baseball. The professor is an aging mathematician whose memory lasts for only 80 minutes before it is erased and he must begin again. He can't remember anything after 1975. He and the boy become friends, and he instills in the boy a love for mathematics. 'It's important to use your intuition,' he tells the housekeeper. 'You swoop down on the numbers, like a kingfisher catching the glint of sunlight on the fish's fin.' When he tells the boy that the number two is the 'leadoff batter for the infinite team of prime numbers after it,' the boy worries that two will get lonely. 'If it gets lonely,' the professor explains, 'it has lots of company with the other even numbers.' 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