"The Housekeeper and the Professor" [.]

[fiefoe]

One can find shades of Momento and Groundhog day in this book. But of course, in a Japanese novel, people usually die because they get sick, and romantic love is more likely to keep company with tragedy.

• I could tell that this one had been attached to the Professor for a long time:"My memory lasts only eighty minutes," it read.
• "And to have my thoughts interrupted is like being strangled."
• "The new housekeeper," it said... The note was proof of something, that he had interrupted his thinking for my sake.
• It helped that he forgot what he'd taught me before, so I was free to repeat the same question until I understood.

• He would take off his cap at the door and present the flat top of his head, as if to show how proud he was to be worthy of the name Root.
• If I was working in the kitchen and heard their laughter drift in from the other room, I felt terribly excluded - and I suppose I wanted to be there when anyone was showing kindness to my son.
• He placed his hand on Root's flat head - a head oddly suited to supporting a hand.
• When I thought about it, the pleasures of our shared mathematical discoveries seemed to fade - though I knew from the Professor that the numbers themselves went on just as they always had, regardless of changes in the world.
• I realized how much I needed this eternal truth that the Professor had described. I needed the sense that his invisible world was somehow propping up the visible one.

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