​The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa is about a housekeeper tasked with taking care of a professor whose memory lasts eighty minutes. The memory loss had been caused by a car accident and now he lives in a tiny dilapidated house where he toils away at math prizes. A beautiful relationship emerges once the son of the housekeeper, nicknamed Root, comes into the equation. The professor cares for Root and is highly protective of him, trying to stop the bleeding from a cut on Roots hand to protecting him from a baseball. Both Root and the professor are enamored with baseball, but in two different ways through math and though the athleticism of the game. Throughout the novel, the housekeeper takes the professor and Root to a baseball game, she learns the tragic nature of the professor’s past, and in the end throws a birthday party for Root as well as for the professor winning a huge math prize. However, as the novel progresses, the professor’s memory shortens. In the end, the professor’s sister-in-law admits him to a living facility where he eventually dies.
 
Ogawa is a master at creating strikingly quiet and profound moments whether in the discussion of math or in the small details of the professor. I was charmed by the relationship between the professor and Root, implying that love and friendship go beyond time and memory. It’s a heartwarming and tender novel that I am glad I revisited.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is a speculative fiction novel that tackles a world in which memory is controlled by an outside force and is able to make things disappear. Ogawa intricately weaves moments of fragility with those of resistance as the island begins to unravel into a void of being forgotten. The narrator, a novelist, has lost her mother and begins to find meaning in keeping secret her editor who is able to remember events/things. As the Memory Police continue to crack down on what exists and what is forgotten, the narrator loses her best friend, her job, and eventually her own body. I was impressed with the way the story the narrator is writing parallels what she is experiencing up until the last moments. Both characters lose themselves, but one keeps her voice. Though, in the end, both characters disappear all the same.
 
Ogawa works to question authority, namely, who has the authority to determine what disappears and what doesn’t, who is affected by the disappearances (the Memory Police isn’t), and why those in position are able to create such a culture of loss. Ogawa seems to be challenging current forms of policing and seems to elicit scenes of those hiding Jews during World War II. I enjoyed the way she describes the disappearances, and that cliff of disconnection with the editor. And the overall effect is this eeriness that blankets every action and description.
 
Final Rating: 4/5