An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Elsewhere, an accomplished surgeon is approached by a cabaret singer, whose beautiful appearance belies the grotesque condition of her heart. And while the surgeon's jealous lover vows to kill him, a violent envy also stirs in the soul of a lonely craftsman. Desire meets with impulse and erupts, attracting the attention of the surgeon's neighbor-who is drawn to a decaying residence that is now home to instruments of human torture. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders-their fates converge in an ominous and darkly beautiful web.
Yoko Ogawa's Revenge is a master class in the macabre that will haunt you to the very end.
Yoko Ogawa presents an original, beautifully written story about a brilliant man who must live with only eighty minutes of short-term memory and the astute young housekeeper who cares for him.
He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem-ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.
She is an astute young Housekeeper-with a ten-year-old son-who is hired to care for the Professor.
And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor's mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities-like the Housekeeper's shoe size-and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.
Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.
