The latest addition to my website is Yōko Ogawa‘s 博士の愛した数式 (The Housekeeper and the Professor). This is a delightful novel about a single mother, uneducated housekeeper, who goes to work for a professor of mathematics, who lost his memory in a car crash, so that he can only remember events before 1975 (seventeen years previously) and in the last eighty minutes. He sees every number or set of numbers as having some mathematical significance and proceeds to explain to her, for example, the significance of her shoe size and phone number. While she is initially baffled, she gradually comes to share his fascination. This is enhanced when her ten year old son, at the behest of the professor, comes to the cottage after school and not only takes to the professor, as a sort of father figure, but also shares the fascination with mathematics. The two also share an interest in baseball, supporting the local team. The relationship between the three is the key to the novel and Ogawa tells the story superbly, as well as teaching us some obscure mathematical facts.