Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common?
Here’s a tricky question for your next pub quiz. What do the following people have in common? The protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, Scott Bakula’s character in Star Trek: Enterprise and Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders of Apple Computers?
Answer: they have all suffered, at one time or another, from anterograde amnesia, an unusual form of memory loss which can follow a traumatic brain injury. To their number may now be added the central character of Yoko Ogawa’s new novel, a professor of advanced mathematics whose memory ‘stopped’ in 1975 when he was involved in a car accident. Since then, the professor — whose name we never learn — can recall at any moment only the last 80 minutes of his life. ‘He can remember a theorem he developed 30 years ago, but he has no idea what he ate for dinner last night.’
Elmore Leonard once observed that if your idea for a story is a character with amnesia, then you don’t have a story. Ogawa would doubtless disagree. She plainly sees the professor’s condition as a metaphor for all human relationships. How well can we ever know a person? What do our memories mean? Into the professor’s ramshackle Tokyo apartment she introduces the housekeeper of the title, a 28-year-old single mother with a young son whom the professor nicknames Root, ‘because the flat top of his head reminded him of the square root sign’. A touching relationship develops between the three characters, despite the fact that the professor is effectively meeting them for the first time every day.
Mathematics is the key. The house- keeper hated maths at school so much ‘that the mere sight of the textbook made [her] feel ill’.
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