Un mes de marzo, una agencia de colocacin enva a una joven empleada del hogar a casa de un hurao profesor retirado. Sin embargo, no es un profesor cualquiera: antao fue un reconocido matemtico pero, tras un trgico accidente, solo recuerda lo ocurrido en los ltimos ochenta minutos. Aunque siguen apasionndole los nmeros, debe apuntar las cosas importantes en papelitos para repasarlas todos los das, incluida la identidad de quienes lo rodean; una situacin que lo convierte en alguien muy vulnerable. Sin embargo, el profesor ir aceptando en su vida la irrupcin de la asistenta y de su hijo de diez aos, con quien comparte una aficin: el bisbol.
Poco a poco se fraguar entre los tres una hermosa relacin fundada en el afecto y en la transmisin del saber. Una novela que devuelve la esperanza en el alma humana.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Yoko Ogawa's 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. 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 the Professor. 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.