Such beautiful writing, even in translation! Seemingly prosaic but almost dreamlike at the same time. ( )

I've had a horrid gastrointestinal bug for days now and so it has taken me four days to read a 180-page book. It was the nicest book to read while convalescing on my sofa with soft blankets and plenty of pillows and a cat in need of cuddles.

To begin with, this book is beautiful, sweet, and unusual. Never before have I read a book in which love expresses itself in mathematics. Through prime numbers, perfect numbers, Fermat's Last Theorem and Euler's formula, each calculates the bond between the professor and his housekeeper and her ten year old son. The professor, who loses his memory every eighty minutes, has only mathematics as a constant. The rules never change, unlike his life, which is a suspicious and fearsome place every time another eighty minutes passes and he must start again to learn about his surroundings.

One of the odd things about this book, and there are many, is that the characters don't have names. There is the housekeeper, her son whom the professor calls Root (because his head looks like a square root symbol), the professor, and the professor's sister-in-law, who is referred to as 'the widow'. The only named character is Yutaka Enatsu, considered by many to be the best pitcher in the history of Japanese baseball. Enatsu is the only person whom the professor's memory held onto after his accident and subsequent brain damage in 1976. It is imperative that the housekeeper and her son keep the professor from knowing that Enatsu no longer plays baseball, for fear of what the lack of this constant would do to him.

This book is about love, I think. It is not a romance; the professor becomes part of the housekeeper's family, or she becomes part of his. Through love and kindness this family is formed, through consideration and proximity and a fascination for pure mathematics, which the housekeeper soon finds fascinating and a way of sharing the professor's interests.

It is hard to describe how good this book is because I have nothing to compare it to. I've never met a book before that runs on mathematics and recurrent amnesia and household chores. If I'd known the book was so math-oriented I wouldn't have read it, so I'm very glad that the cover of the book didn't give any of that away.

'Peaceful' was the professor's highest compliment: he hated noise and crowds. This book has left me feeling peaceful, and has given me hope that I can find for myself a family now that the twists and turns of life have deprived me of my own. ( )

A delicate tale of affection, the novel resents of some evanescence in plot and definition of characters' traits, typical of some Japanese literature of last decades. That said, it's a very pleasant reading; the professor is an unforgettable character, a mixture of spontaneous kindness, vulnerability and moral strenght, able to deeply change the lives of people around him even in his darkest hours at the end of his life. ( )

This is a quiet book. Little happens. Things are set up - the valuable stack of old baseball cards, the possibility of an accident - but nothing happens with these possibilities. The housekeeper and her son come across as real characters, but there is something unbelievable about the professor - he is too much the poet to convince. ( )

Story: 8.5 / 10
Characters: 7.5
Setting: 7
Prose: 8.5

Themes: Family, work, memory, relationships, time, personality, mathematics, leisure ( )