Yoko Ogawa's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope.?Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award.

"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

"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

"Deceptively elegant . . . The Housekeeper and the Professor tells of the adventures, such as they are, of the remarkable virtual family formed by the professor's new cook and cleaner, the single mother of a 10-year-old boy whom the professor calls Root because his flat head reminds him of the mathematical sign for a square root. Nobody except Root really has a name. Every morning the housekeeper, who narrates the story, has to introduce herself and her son to the professor all over again. He, in turn, as he does whenever he is stuck or flustered or has extended his 80-minute window, is likely to ask her shoe size or her telephone number. He always has something amazing to say about whatever number comes up . . . This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water. But even in the clearest waters can lurk currents you don't see until you are in them. Dive into Yoko Ogawa's world . . . and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen. What is the problem with all the men in the house?keeper's life? Who is the woman in the photograph buried under baseball cards in a tin on the professor's desk? Can the professor love somebody he can't remember? And, of course: Where do numbers come from? The professor's answer is that they are already there at the beginning of time, 'in God's notebook.' This is how he responds when the housekeeper has made a lucky guess about a problem: 'Good,' he almost shouted, shaking the leather strap of his watch. I didn't know what to say. 'It's important to use your intuition. You swoop down on the numbers, like a kingfisher catching the glint of sunlight on the fish's fin' . . . If we all had learned math from such a teacher we would all be a lot smarter."-Dennis Overbye, The New York Times Book Review

"Strangely charming, flecked with enough wit and mystery to keep us engaged throughout. This is Ogawa's first novel to be translated into English, and Stephen Snyder has done an exceptionally elegant job."&#