63 pages • 2 hours read
The Housekeeper and the Professor
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BetaChapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The novel opens in medias res, with the unnamed narrator reflecting on her and her son Root’s relationship with the Professor. The Professor nicknamed her son “Root” because of the flat top of his head, which reminded him of a square root sign. Of the “countless” things the Professor taught them, the meaning of square root was the most important. The Professor never cared if they got something wrong, “for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers” (2). Moreover, he “had enormous respect for matters about which he had no knowledge” and didn’t mind taking the back seat when appropriate (3).
The narrator comes to work for the Professor in March 1992 when her employer, the Akebono Housekeeping Agency, assigns her to his home. She knows that the assignment will be difficult because he has already gone through nine housekeepers; however, she is known for working dutifully for difficult clients.
She is interviewed by the Professor’s widowed sister-in-law, who explains that the tasks are relatively simple: The narrator must come in on weekdays, fix lunch and dinner, clean the house, and do the shopping. When the narrator asks to meet the Professor, his sister-in-law says no: The Professor would not remember her, as his memory lasts only 80 minutes at a time as the result of a car accident in 1975. The widow’s residence is in the main house on the south side of the property, but that the narrator is not allowed to disturb her there and must remain in the cottage with the Professor only.
When the narrator arrives for her first day of work, the Professor asks her shoe size and her telephone number; he then tells her interesting facts about each number. She realizes that the Professor talks about interesting numbers whenever he’s not sure what to do. Because he never remembers her, they go through this routine every morning, sometimes with different numbers.
The Professor is 64, although he looks older; prior to his accident, he was an expert in number theory. Despite rarely going out, he always wears a suit and tie, his jacket completely covered in slips of paper reminding him about important things. The narrator’s duties are straightforward, but between the suit covered in slips of paper and the constant questions about numbers, she finds the environment to be a bit distracting.
At her company, the narrator gathers information about the Professor from his previous housekeepers. His sister-in-law was the wife of his much older brother, who grew wealthy by expanding the family’s textile factory and provided for the Professor’s studies. Shortly after the Professor earned his doctorate, however, the brother passed away. His widow replaced the factory with apartments and lived off their rents. She and the Professor coexisted peacefully but separately until the accident; after he lost his job, he became completely dependent on her.
The cottage where the Professor lives is small and shabby, and nothing seems to work. Moreover, the narrator often has no idea what to do, as the Professor spends his days shut up in his study working on mathematics journal contests, his sole source of income.
On her first day, she tries to make him lunch only to discover that there is no food in the house. When she asks him what he’d like, she accidentally interrupts his thoughts while he’s working on a problem, angering him. After this, she tries to avoid interrupting him while he’s thinking, but she soon discovers that he is always thinking. She must ask questions at precise, opportune moments.
At the end of her first week, his attitude is different. He politely asks her to mail some papers to the Journal of Mathematics. Taken aback by his humility, she posts his mail. When she returns, he is resting, so she takes the opportunity to clean his study. She is surprised to notice that the room has little character and little of sentimental value.
After dinner, for once, the Professor does not rush back to his study, but instead asks her birthday. The narrator is worried that she didn’t send the proof express, but he explains that it’s just as important for a proof to be beautiful as correct. Through gradual conversation, he shows her that her birthday, 220, and a number on his watch, 284, are so-called amicable numbers: The factors of one add up to the other and vice versa.
Chapter 2 Summary
After the narrator returns home, she decides to look for amicable numbers on her own; however, she quickly discovers that the Professor was right that such numbers are extremely rare. In her search, though, she finds that the sum of the factors of 28 is equal to 28—she thinks this number might be special but isn’t sure. As she goes to bed, she realizes it’s been more than 80 minutes since she last saw the Professor, meaning that he would no longer remember their conversation.
The narrator finds her work for the Professor much easier and more leisurely than other jobs. Still, she struggles to understand how his memory works: “According to the old woman, he remembered nothing after 1975; but I had no idea what yesterday meant to him or whether he could think ahead to tomorrow, or how much he suffered” (21). That said, she finds that his memory limit is extremely precise: if she goes shopping and returns even a minute past 80 minutes, he no longer remembers her.
In order to avoid upsetting him, she avoids discussing anything that might remind the Professor of his memory loss, such as the current prime minister or the upcoming Olympics. However, when she slips up, it doesn’t bother him—if he can’t follow a conversation, he waits patiently until he can. She also notices that he avoids asking her questions, which she assumes is because he doesn’t want to bother her by asking the same questions over and over again.
Numbers, however, are always a safe topic of conversation. One day over dinner, they discuss numbers in Ancient Greece and the narrator then tells the Professor about her search for more amicable numbers. Even her 10-year-old son helped her try to find some. The Professor expresses agitation that the boy is home alone—instead, the Professor insists she bring her son to the cottage after school.
The narrator’s son goes to the cottage after school the next day. Though she is initially wary, the Professor is very kind toward her son. The Professor nicknames the boy Root. The Professor insists that they eat dinner together to keep the narrator from making two dinners or keeping Root up too late. The Professor’s manners become exemplary in front of Root, and he grows talkative.
The narrator’s relationship with Root has always been distant. She grew up with a single mother who made ends meet by working at a reception hall for weddings; because she spent so much time on her own at home, she learned to be a housekeeper initially out of necessity. In high school, the narrator became pregnant by a college student who refused to take responsibility for the baby; her mother was furious with her, so she left home before giving birth and cut off contact. They reconciled just before Root entered school, but her mother died shortly after. It makes the narrator happy to see Root and the Professor grow close.
The Professor always greets Root when he arrives. Often, though, Root leaves to play baseball with his friends, which disappoints the Professor. When it rains, however, the Professor is happy because he is able to help Root with his math homework. The narrator is amazed that the Professor is such a good teacher despite the relatively simple homework: The Professor is always kind, praising Root and never losing patience with him. While working with the boy, the Professor “was no longer a frail old man, nor a scholar lost in his thoughts, but the rightful protector of a child” (37).
One night, the Professor wants to give Root some homework: figuring out the sum of the numbers from one through ten. In return, Root asks him to get the radio fixed so that they can listen to baseball. As it turns out, they both love the Tigers, and the Professor announces that Yutaka Enatsu is the best pitcher of all time.
Chapter 3 Summary
One nice day, the narrator convinces the Professor to go for a walk and get a haircut. He is clearly tense as they walk, and he remains tense throughout the haircut, even though the barber is kind and understanding.
After the haircut, they sit together in the park and the Professor tells her about his university studies. The narrator tells the Professor about her discovery about 28. This is called a perfect number—six is the smallest such number. These numbers are quite rare: The next one after 28 is 496, then 8128, then not until the tens of millions.
As they prepare to leave, they hear a little girl cry in the sandbox. The Professor immediately runs to comfort her. Her mother, though, rushes the girl away from him.
Root has solved the Professor’s homework problem, and he excitedly tells the Professor that he has to fix the radio now. The Professor stares at the answer, and the narrator realizes he likely has no idea what Root is talking about but is “looking for an answer in the sum itself” (46). The Professor avoids asking questions about anything from more than 80 minutes ago, not from pride, but rather from “a deep aversion to causing more trouble than necessary for those of us who lived in the normal world” (47).
Although Root’s answer is correct and his method—simply adding all the numbers up—is valid, the Professor asks him how he could add up all the numbers from one to 100, or one to 1000, etc. There’s a simpler way to solve such a problem regardless of the number—if Root can figure it out, then the Professor will get the radio fixed.
The Tigers are having a good year. The Professor asks what Enatsu’s ERA is, but Root tells him that Enatsu was traded years ago and is now retired. Usually, the Professor takes his displacement in stride, but this time he seems wounded. Root, too, is upset at his mistake and the grief he has caused the Professor. Root sulks on the way home, but the narrator reminds him that the Professor will have forgotten all about it by the next day.
The shop fixes the radio, and the Professor is surprised to learn that you can listen to baseball on it. The Professor only has the radio because his brother bought it to practice English. He also doesn’t own a TV, and he admits to Root that he’s never actually seen a baseball game. He knows baseball through numbers—he used to follow the Tigers by tracking game statistics in the newspapers.
Earlier, Root and the narrator tried to figure out the best solution to the Enatsu problem; in the meantime, Root went to the library to learn everything he could about Enatsu to fake his way through conversations with the Professor and avoid upsetting him.
After dinner, Root and the narrator present their answer to the problem. After removing 10 from the list, they noticed that the middle number, five, is the average of all the other numbers. So to figure out the sum, you just have to multiply five times the number of other numbers (nine)—45—plus 10 makes 55.
At first the narrator believes the proof must be laughably simple to the Professor, but after a moment of examination, he gives them a standing ovation. He then shows them how to turn their discovery into an abstract formula for any set of numbers.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
As noted above, the novel opens in medias res, and it’s important to remember that the narrator is telling a story that took place in her past. She mostly narrates as if from “five minutes in the future,” but little moments throughout the novel remind us that her perspective is from far later than that: The bulk of the story takes place in 1992, during the brief time that the narrator works for the Professor, though we are sometimes pulled forward to the contemporary moment, circa 2003. This looking backward perspective is a common technique in fiction; here, it also connects to the overarching theme of the novel: the nature of memory. The Professor perpetually exists in 1975, the year of his car accident, and to avoid upsetting him, everyone does their best not to disturb the illusion. The Professor’s impact on the narrator is so strong that she is similarly anchored in their year together, 1992, continually returning to small, impactful moments from that time as a coping mechanism.
Housekeeper is a novel about memory not just because of the Professor’s amnesia but because of the way that it complicates our understanding of memory. In these chapters, we’re also introduced to an alternative to memory through the Professor’s note system. Although the system is strange and doesn’t quite make up for his memory loss, it still allows him to function, transferring his long-term memory from inside his mind to the outside of his jacket. Storing one’s thoughts on one’s clothes has limits, however—the Professor must determine what is most important to “remember” because his jacket only has so much space.
This emphasis on only what’s important echoes the novel’s purposeful lack of specificity. The narrator does not identify herself, her son, or the Professor by name, and she simply refers to “the town” or “the city” in which they live. Ostensibly, since most of the novel takes place inside the Professor’s cottage, the outside world is largely unimportant. (Significantly, however, later in the novel, they see the Tigers play against Hiroshima—a clue that the novel takes place in Hiroshima, a city which suffered its own version of annihilated memory after the US dropped an atomic bomb on it in WWII.)
There are several moments of foreshadowing in these chapters. The Professor can hold a memory for only 80 minutes exactly, so the narrator makes a concerted effort never to be apart from him for longer than that while she’s working. This precise piece of information leads us to expect that at some point, something will disrupt this system. Additionally, the Professor’s sister-in-law’s firm restrictions and silent oversight set up the conflict the narrator will eventually have with the widow.
Of the Professor’s quirks, the most important is his love for children and his belief in protecting them. Despite the narrator’s centrality, its heart is really Root’s relationship with the Professor. But this section also demonstrates how removed the Professor is from the rest of society through the incident with the girl in the sandbox in Chapter 3: To the Professor, it’s only natural to come to the aid of an injured child, but the child’s mother is ungrateful and suspicious. The Professor is clearly disconnected from the modern world; strikingly, the narrator, who sees only goodness in the Professor’s actions, also is thus at odds with society.
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