This is a quote from the book Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Quote by Sayaka Murata, “The tensions of meeting after such a long time was beginning to dissipate, and I could feel the beloved uncle who had always spoiled me as a kid coming through.”
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.
Earthlings – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Natsuki isn’t like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. Together with her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what.
Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki’s family are increasing, her friends wonder why she’s still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki’s childhood are pursuing her. Fleeing the suburbs for the mountains of her childhood, Natsuki prepares herself with a reunion with Yuu. Will he still remember their promise? And will he help her keep it?
This is an excerpt from the book Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Uncle Teruyoshi was waiting at the ticket gate when we arrived at Nagano Station.
“Thank you for going to the trouble of coming out to meet us,” I said.
His hair was now completely white, and for a moment I didn’t recognize him. The figure waving to me and calling out “Natsuki!” looked more like my grandfather than the uncle I’d known twenty-three years before.
“I’ve heard all about Akishina from Natsuki. Being able to actually go there is like a dream come true! Thank you so much.”
“Oh, the pleasure is all mine. These days it’s what you call a critically depopulated village, with lots of empty houses. It’s a bit bleak, really. Grandpa will be happy that you youngsters have come all this way to pay him a visit.”
Uncle Teruyoshi looked smaller than I remembered. I’d probably also grown a bit since elementary school, but I didn’t think that was the only reason.
“Shall we go and have lunch somewhere? Once we get to Akishina, there’s no stores or eateries or anything, so it’s best to do some shopping for food before we go.”
“Thank you, but we already brought pretty much everything we need with us,” I said, showing him the big bag I was carrying over my shoulder.
“You haven’t changed at all, Natsuki. You always were well prepared,” he said with a smile.
“Do you mind if I go to the bathroom before we set off?” my husband asked.
As he ran off to find the bathroom, Uncle Teruyoshi said, it’s quite a bit cooler here than in Tokyo, isn’t it? You can wait inside the car if you like.”
“No, I’m fine. I also anticipated that and brought a coat with me.”
“You did? I guess you know the Akishina weather well, too, Natsuki,” he said, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I told Yuu that you were coming. He himself said it would be better if he stayed somewhere else, but it’s not easy at such short notice.”
“I’m sorry to have caused such a fuss.”
“No, it’s fine. That house had been lying empty ever since Granny died and was a bit desolate. There had been talk of demolishing it since it’s so run-down, so I was happy when Yuu said he wanted to stay there. It somehow felt a bit like the old days. The two of you always did love that house, didn’t you?” Uncle murmured, narrowing his eyes as he reeled in the memories. Then he looked down. “I felt really bad about what happened back then, you know.”
I looked at him in surprise.
“You were both just children and didn’t know any better. And all of us adults totally overreacted. We tried to put a lid on it to cover it up. Adults are so violent and overbearing, they really are.”
“Not at all…well now that I’ve grown up I can understand the circumstances better. You didn’t do anything wrong, Uncle Teruyoshi.”
“Does your husband know about what happened? Sorry if I’m sticking my nose in where it’s not wanted.”
“You don’t need to worry about him,” I said flatly.
He looked a little relieved and smiled. “You married well, didn’t you?”
“Are you okay? You don’t look too good,” I said to my husband.
“I’ll be okay,” he groaned, holding a handkerchief over his mouth.
Uncle Teruyoshi drove skillfully around the hairpin bends. The mountain road was steeper and narrower than I remembered, with a cliff dropping off to one side, and there weren’t any guard rails. Every time we went around a curve, our bottoms slid over the back seat and squashed our bodies against each other.
“It’s tough for people who aren’t used to it. Shall I stop somewhere for a rest?”
“No, I’m okay.”
“Really? If you can cope, then it’s definitely better to get it over and done with. These bends are really hard to deal with when you don’t know them. Are you doing okay, Natsuki?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said bravely, although actually I was feeling quite uneasy about falling off the edge. I didn’t want Uncle to think I’d gone soft living in the metropolis and had forgotten how wild the Akishina mountains were.
“You haven’t changed at all, have you, Natsuki?” Uncle said, looking pleased.
The tensions of meeting after such a long time was beginning to dissipate, and I could feel the beloved uncle who had always spoiled me as a kid coming through.
“Just three more bends to go, and we’ll be there. Hold on just a bit longer!”
Leaves scratched against the window. I had the feeling that the greenery was pressing in on us with a greater intensity than it had long ago. I was up against the window gazing at the trees like I’d done as a child. We climbed up and up the unfamiliar winding tunnel of green until my ears started popping painfully, then suddenly the vista opened out before us.
“We’re here! Natsuki and Tomoya, welcome to Akishina!” he announced, bringing tears to my eyes.
And there, just beyond the familiar small red bridge, was the Akishina that I had replayed in my mind time and time again over the years.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
Earthlings – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
Natsuki isn’t like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. Together with her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what.
Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki’s family are increasing, her friends wonder why she’s still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki’s childhood are pursuing her. Fleeing the suburbs for the mountains of her childhood, Natsuki prepares herself with a reunion with Yuu. Will he still remember their promise? And will he help her keep it?
This is an excerpt from the book The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.
WE CALLED HIM the Professor. And he called my son Root, because, he said, the flat top of his head reminded him of the square root sign.
“There’s a fine brain in there,” the Professor said, mussing my son’s hair. Root, who wore a cap to avoid being teased by his friends, gave a wary shrug. “With this one little sign we can come to know an infinite range of numbers, even those we can’t see.” He traced the symbol in the thick layer of dust on his desk.
Of all the countless things my son and I learned from the Professor, the meaning of the square root was among the most important. No doubt he would have been bothered by my use of the word countless—too sloppy, for he believed that the very origins of the universe could be explained in the exact language of numbers—but I don’t know how else to put it. He taught us about enormous prime numbers with more than a hundred thousand places, and the largest number of all, which was used in mathematical proofs and was in the Guinness Book of Records, and about the idea of something beyond infinity. As interesting as all this was, it could never match the experience of simply spending time with the Professor. I remember when he taught us about the spell cast by placing numbers under this square root sign. It was a rainy evening in early April. My son’s schoolbag lay abandoned on the rug. The light in the Professor’s study was dim. Outside the window, the blossoms on the apricot tree were heavy with rain.
The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the “correct miscalculation,” for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers. This gave us confidence even when our best efforts came to nothing.
“Then what happens if you take the square root of negative one?” he asked.
“So you’d need to get – 1 by multiplying a number by itself?” Root asked. He had just learned fractions at school, and it had taken a half-hour lecture from the Professor to convince him that numbers less than zero even existed, so this was quite a leap. We tried picturing the square root of negative one in our heads: . The square root of 100 is 10; the square root of 16 is 4; the square root of 1 is 1. So the square root of – 1 is …
He didn’t press us. On the contrary, he fondly studied our expressions as we mulled over the problem.
“There is no such number,” I said at last, sounding rather tentative.
“Yes, there is,” he said, pointing at his chest. “It’s in here. It’s the most discreet sort of number, so it never comes out where it can be seen. But it’s here.” We fell silent for a moment, trying to picture the square root of minus one in some distant, unknown place. The only sound was the rain falling outside the window. My son ran his hand over his head, as if to confirm the shape of the square root symbol.
But the Professor didn’t always insist on being the teacher. He had enormous respect for matters about which he had no knowledge, and he was as humble in such cases as the square root of negative one itself. Whenever he needed my help, he would interrupt me in the most polite way. Even the simplest request—that I help him set the timer on the toaster, for example—always began with “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but …” Once I’d set the dial, he would sit peering in as the toast browned. He was as fascinated by the toast as he was by the mathematical proofs we did together, as if the truth of the toaster were no different from that of the Pythagorean theorem.
The Housekeeper and the Professor – Summary
Here is the book summary:
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 him.
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.
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.
This is a quote from the book The Emissary by Yōko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani.
Quote by Yōko Tawada, “Wallowing in self-pity had felt sweet, warm, and deliciously sad.”
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.
The Emissary – Summary
Here is the book summary:
Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient—frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism. Yoshiro concentrates on nourishing Mumei, a strangely wonderful boy who offers “the beauty of the time that is yet to come.”
A delightful, irrepressibly funny book, The Emissary is filled with light. Yoko Tawada, deftly turning inside-out “the curse,” defies gravity and creates a playful joyous novel out of a dystopian one, with a legerdemain uniquely her own.
This is an excerpt from the book The Emissary by Yōko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani.
“Mumei, are you all right? Does it hurt? Can you breathe?” Yoshiro would say, his eyes filling with tears as he patted the boy lightly on the back or held his head in his arms, pressing it to his chest. Yet despite the appearance of suffering, Mumei himself would be strangely calm. As if resigning himself to a storm at sea, he’d simply wait for the coughing fit to pass.
When the coughing stopped, Mumei would go back to drinking his juice as if nothing had happened. Looking up at Yoshiro, he wold ask in surprise, “Great-grandpa, are you all right?” He didn’t seem to know what “suffering” meant; he simply coughed when food wouldn’t go down, or vomited it back up. Of course he felt pain, but it was pure pain unaccompanied by any “Why am I the only one who has to suffer like this?” sort of lamentation that Yoshiro knew so well. Perhaps this acceptance was a treasure given to the youngest generation. Mumei didn’t know how to feel sorry for himself.
When Yoshiro was a child, his mother babied him whenever he caught cold or ran a fever. Wallowing in self-pity had felt sweet, warm, and deliciously sad. As an adult he knew that, although he had to go to work no matter how much he hated it, illness would give him a bona fide excuse for staying at home, spending the whole day in bed reading or just thinking. It was easy to catch the flu. All he had to do was make sure he didn’t get enough sleep. And even after he recovered, he always managed to get sick again a few months later. Finally, he realized that his true purpose was not to come down with some illness, but to quit his job.
Fortunately, Mumei had never seen adults clinging to illness in this unseemly way. And if he kept on in this way, he would be free until he died, never feeling sorry for himself or using his weakness to ingratiate himself with the people around him.
For about ninety percent of children these days fever was a constant companion. Mumei was always slightly feverish. As checking the thermometer daily only made the adults nervous, a flier came from school instructing them not to. If told they had a fever, kids would start to feel dull and lethargic. And if they were kept home every time their temperature was above normal, some would hardly go to school at all. Besides, since every school had a qualified doctor on duty, it was really best for them to com to school when they were sick. “Because the purpose of fever is to kill germs, children shouldn’t be given medicine to bring down a fever” had been standard medical advice for ages, bu t only recently had doctors begun to tell parents “Never take your child’s temperature.”
Yoshiro and Mumei buried their thermometer at the Thingamabob Cemetery, a public graveyard where anyone could pay their last respects to something they wanted to part with. Some of the buried objects, still longing for the world above, were apparently trying to return to it; from the earth, disturbed by the rain that day, part of a white headband with a red Rising Sun in the center peeked out, fluttering in the wind. Yoshiro imagined its former owner as either a high school student who was done with his university entrance exams, or a youth who had graduated from some right-wing gang. The leg of an upside-down teddy bear stuck out of the ground. The bear probably wanted to get out, too. Mumei imagined all the various things buried here: broken garden shears, split into two tadpoles; worn-out shoes with paper thin soles; a toy drum with a broken head; the wedding ring of a couple now divorce; a fountain pen with a bent tip; a map of the world. Yoshiro had once buried the manuscript of a novel he was working on here. He’d thought of burning it in the garden but submitting it to the flames had seemed so cruel he couldn’t bring himself to strike a match. Everyone has reasons for burning some bits of trash but not others. Ken-to-shi, Emissary to China, he’d called it, his first and only historical novel: he was already well into it when he realized he’d included the names of far too many foreign countries. Place names spread throughout the novel like blood vessels, dividing into ever smaller branches then setting down roots, making it impossible to eliminate them from the text. he’d had to get rid of the manuscript for his own protection, and since burning it was too painful, he had buried it.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
The Emissary – Summary
Here is the book summary:
Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient—frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism. Yoshiro concentrates on nourishing Mumei, a strangely wonderful boy who offers “the beauty of the time that is yet to come.”
A delightful, irrepressibly funny book, The Emissary is filled with light. Yoko Tawada, deftly turning inside-out “the curse,” defies gravity and creates a playful joyous novel out of a dystopian one, with a legerdemain uniquely her own.
This month, August, is a chance to celebrate women in translation, specifically women authors who’s works have been translated. There’s so much good translated literature out there. For this month, I’ll be sharing some inspiration for women authors from around the world who have had their work translated into English.
I know a lot of people read works translated from English into their own language, and there’s so many languages that works need to be translated into. But since I only read in English, I’m going to be highlighting works that have been translated into English.
This week we’ll be visiting North/East Asia. Depending on the source, it may call the region either North or East Asia. This area typically includes countries like China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Mongolia.
Countries like Japan and South Korea are very prominent in translated literature because their governments actively support translation efforts. Their governments have prioritized translating their national literature as a way of cultural preservation and enabling their local talent to gain international recognition. I think this is amazing, and I would love to see more countries supporting their local talent in this way.
Due to this additional support, you’ll often see a lot of books recommended from these countries, especially when talking about books in translation. I’ve included a few books from Japan and South Korea, but I’ve also included a few others to diversify the list.
Here’s a list of five books of translated literature with women authors from North/East Asia.
Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang (China)
Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin (Taiwan)
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa (Japan)
Human Acts by Han Kang (Korea)
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata (Japan)
Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published in their original language.
Love in a Fallen City (1946) – China
by Eileen Chang Translated by Karen S. Kingsbury
Year Published: 1946 (English version in 2006)
Storygraph Categories: fiction, classics, short stories, emotional, mysterious, reflective, slow-paced
Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang’s achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.
Qiu Miaojin was posthumously awarded the China Times Literature Award in 1995 for this book
Set in the post-martial-law era of late 1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin’s cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon.
It received the Hon’ya Taisho award and a film adaptation was released in January 2006
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 him.
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.
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.
Storygraph Categories: fiction, historical, literary, dark, emotional, sad, medium-paced
It won Korea’s Manhae Prize for Literature and Italy’s Malaparte Prize
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend’s corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma.
Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.
Note, this novel deals with many difficult themes, I would recommend checking content warnings before reading if there are any subjects you want to avoid.
Natsuki isn’t like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. Together with her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what.
Now Natsuki is grown. She lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki’s family are increasing, her friends wonder why she’s still not pregnant, and dark shadows from Natsuki’s childhood are pursuing her. Fleeing the suburbs for the mountains of her childhood, Natsuki prepares herself with a reunion with Yuu. Will he still remember their promise? And will he help her keep it?
I hope you found something of interest in this list of books written by North/East Asian authors.
I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. If you have a favourite book written by a North/East Asian author, please feel free to share it in a comment below!
Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.
This is a quote from the book The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.
Quote by Yōko Ogawa, “A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much.”
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.
The Memory Police – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.
A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
This is an excerpt from the book The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.
“May I ask you something?” I said, still looking at him.
“Of course,” he answered.
“How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?”
“That’s a difficult question,” he said, using his forefinger to push up the frames of his glasses and then leaving his hand at his throat.
“I’d imagine you’d be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things.”
“No, that’s not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.”
“So you have everything inside you that has disappeared from the island?”
“I’m not sure about everything. Memories don’t just pile up—they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord. Though the process, for me, is quite different from what happens to the rest of you when something disappears from the island.”
“Different how?” I asked, rubbing my fingernails.
“My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even as they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”
He chose his words carefully, as though weighing each one on his tongue before pronouncing it.
“I sometimes wonder what I’d see if I could hold your heart in my hands,” I told him. “I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn’t quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I’d need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn’t slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It’s usually hidden deep inside so it’s much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember, there in my hands. Doesn’t that sound marvelous?”
“Would you really like to remember all the things you’ve lost?” R asked.
I told him the truth. “I don’t know. Because I don’t even know what it is I should be remembering. What’s gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That’s why I’m jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles.”
“When I read your novels, I never imagine that your heart is hollow.”
“But you have to admit that it’s difficult to be a writer on this island. Words seem to retreat further and further away with each disappearance. I suspect the only reason I’ve been able to go on writing is that I’ve had your heart by my side all along.”
“If that’s true then I’m glad,” R said.
I turned my palms up and held them out. Then we stared at them for a time, without so much as blinking, as though I were actually holding something in my hands. But no matter how hard we looked, it was painfully clear that they were empty.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
The Memory Police – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.
A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
This is a quote from the book The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.
Quote by Yōko Ogawa, “Among the many things that made the Professor an excellent teacher was the fact that he wasn’t afraid to say “we don’t know.” For the Professor, there was no shame in admitting you didn’t have the answer, it was a necessary step toward the truth. It was as important to teach us about the unknown or the unknowable as it was to teach us what had already been safely proven.”
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.
The Housekeeper and the Professor – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
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 him.
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.
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.
This is an excerpt from the book The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.
The Professor loved prime numbers more than anything in the world. I’d been vaguely aware of their existence, but it never occurred to me that they could be the object of someone’s deepest affection. He was tender and attentive and respectful; by turns he would caress them or prostrate himself before them; he never strayed far from his prime numbers. Whether at his desk or at the dinner table, when he talked about numbers, primes were most likely to make an appearance. At first, it was hard to see their appeal. They seemed so stubborn, resisting division by any number but one and themselves. Still, as we were swept up in the Professor’s enthusiasm, we gradually came to understand his devotion, and the primes began to seem more real, as though we could reach out and touch them. I’m sure they meant something different to each of us, but as soon as the Professor would mention prime numbers, we would look at each other with conspiratorial smiles. Just as the thought of a caramel can cause your mouth to water, the mere mention of prime numbers made us anxious to know more about their secrets.
Evening was a precious time for the three of us. The vague tension around my morning arrival—which for the Professor was always our first encounter—had dissipated, and Root livened up our quiet days. I suppose that’s why I’ll always remember the Professor’s face in the evening, in profile, lit by the setting sun.
Inevitably, the Professor repeated himself when he talked about prime numbers. But Root and I had promised each other that we would never tell him, even if we had heard the same thing several times before—a promise we took as seriously as our agreement to hide the truth about Enatsu. No matter how weary we were of hearing a story, we always made an effort to listen attentively. We felt we owed that to the Professor, who had put so much effort into treating the two of us as real mathematicians. But our main concern was to avoid confusing him. Any kind of uncertainty caused him pain, so we were determined to hide the time that had passed and the memories he’d lost. Biting our tongues was the least we could do.
But the truth was, we were almost never bored when he spoke of mathematics. Though he often returned to the topic of prime numbers—the proof that there were an infinite number of them, or a code that had been devised based on primes, or the most enormous known examples, or twin primes, or the Mersenne, primes—the slightest change in the shape of his argument could make you see something you had never understood before. Even a difference in the weather or in his tone of voice seemed to cast these numbers in a different light.
To me, the appeal of prime numbers had something to do with the fact that you could never predict when one would appear. They seemed to be scattered along the number line at any place that took their fancy. The farther you get from zero, the harder they are to find, and no theory or rule could predict where they will turn up next. It was this tantalizing puzzle that held the Professor captive.
“Let’s try finding the prime numbers up to 100,” the Professor said one day when Root had finished his homework. He took his pencil and began making a list: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97.
It always amazed me how easily numbers seemed to flow from the Professor, at any time, under any circumstances. How could these trembling hands, which could barely turn on the microwave, make such precise numbers of all shapes and sizes?
I also liked the way he wrote his numbers with his little stub of a pencil. The 4 was so round it looked like a knot of ribbon, and the 5 was leaning so far forward it seemed about to tip over. They weren’t lined up very neatly, but they all had a certain personality. The Professor’s lifelong affection for numbers could be seen in every figure he wrote.
“So, what do you see?” He tended to begin with this sort of general question.
They’re scattered all over the place.” Root usually answered first. “And 2 is the only one that’s even.” For some reason, he always noticed the odd man out.
“You’re right. Two is the only even prime. It’s the leadoff batter for the infinite team of prime numbers after it.”
“That must be awfully lonely,” said Root.
“Don’t worry,” said the Professor. “If it gets lonely, it has lots of company with the other even numbers.”
“But some of them come in pairs, like 17 and 19, and 41 and 43,” I said, not wanting to be shown up by Root.
“A very astute observation,” said the Professor. “Those are known as ‘twin primes.’”
I wondered why ordinary words seemed so exotic when they were used in relation to numbers. Amicable numbers or twin primes had a precise quality about them, and yet they sounded as though they’d been taken straight out of a poem. In my mind, the twins had matching outfits and stood holding hands as they waited in the number line.
“As the numbers get bigger, the distance between primes increases as well, and it becomes more difficult to find twins. So we don’t know yet whether twin primes are infinite the way prime numbers themselves are.” As he spoke, the Professor circled the consecutive pairs.
Among the many things that made the Professor an excellent teacher was the fact that he wasn’t afraid to say “we don’t know.” For the Professor, there was no shame in admitting you didn’t have the answer, it was a necessary step toward the truth. It was as important to teach us about the unknown or the unknowable as it was to teach us what had already been safely proven.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
The Housekeeper and the Professor – Summary
Here is the book summary from Goodreads:
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 him.
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.
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.
