A wonderful collection of short stories some dark some a little weird but all cleverly written. There is a loose connection theme running along side the clear prose that is always prevalent in Japanese literature. Highly recommended.
On an isolated island, oppressed citizens are slowly stripped of their material reality. This was a very tightly crafted story. It didn't drag for a moment and every line moved the story forward. The oppressive atmosphere permeated every page, and made for some striking dismal imagery. It's neve...
[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]I hadn’t read anything by Ogawa in 10 years or so, and I admit I don’t really remember anymore all the details, but I do remember I tended to like this author. Hence my seizing the opportunity to get and read this one.It is a st...
The Professor, a brilliant mathematician (who is unnamed), only has eighty minutes of short term memory, due to a traumatic head injury. The Housekeeper assigned to the Professor (also unnamed), is young, astute, and has a ten year old son (nicknamed Root). Each morning, as the Professor and Ho...
The story of The Housekeeper and the Professor is that of the two characters already mentioned in the title plus the housekeeper’s ten-year-old son and the poetry of mathematics. It begins in March 1992 when the narrator takes up her job as the professor’s housekeeper in a shabby back yard garden ...
The housekeeper and the professor is a simple, slice of life story written by Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa. The book details the strange relationship between a professor who has a strange memory problem, a housekeeper and her young son. The story is well crafted, poignant and short. The book is barely...
When I first read the summary of Hotel Iris I didn't know what to expect. The pain and pleasure, would it be that of Marquis de Sade or something soft and mildly shocking? Either way, it managed to grab my attention and I dug into it with great interest. Mari is a seventeen year old girl, who lives ...
A beautiful story that is at once simple yet deep and thought provoking. The translation amazes me, honestly. Many times I've read a Japanese-to-English novel translation that felt stilted, empty of prose, with remnants of Japanese sentence structure awkwardly lurking in the passages. This book is t...
The Professor suffered a tragic accident that left his brain unable to remember anything beyond the date of the accident, in 1975. His short term memory is reduced to 80 minute loops and as a result he had to give up his career as a mathematician to live off the kindness of his brother's widow in a ...
I had bought this book for one of my best friends on a trip to Germany. It always seemed weird to me that I had bought a Japanese book from a german bookstore but back then it was hard to find Japanese literature. My apprehension about this book grew when I read the back cover. It had to do with num...
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