Great Translations: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Photo from asahi.com

A housekeeper is hired to clean and cook for an elderly Japanese man, a retired mathematics professor who suffered a brain injury. The young woman is a single mom, only child of another single mom. It’s unfortunate she had to drop out to start working full-time before finishing high school because, as the story goes along, we see that she’s better at doing math problems than…