All About Japan Book Club: April 19

Inspired by Japanese fiction and literature, the All About Japan book club is your chance to dive deeper into Japanese literature! Our discussion is Saturday April 19 at 10:00 a.m. and every other month thereafter at da Shop. For our first discussion we will be featuring The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa. Available for purchase in store and on our website.

About co-host/discussion moderator:

Hilson Reidpath lived and studied in Japan and Okinawa for ten years before moving to Hawai'i. He is currently a PhD student at UH Manoa where he teaches classes on Japanese and Okinawan literature under the arduous supervision of his two cats.

About the book:

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 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.

Host or Publisher da Shop: books + curiosities