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 wiring as the last way of preserving the past.

The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan's most celebrated, award-winning authors.Beautiful, twisted and brilliant - discover Yoko Ogawa.A lonely teenaged girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool - an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, but rather than a story of growth the diary reveals a more sinister tale of greed and repulsion.Out of nostalgia, a woman visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo. There she finds an isolated world shadowed by decay, haunted by absent students and the disturbing figure of the crippled caretaker.

"It's not just Murakami but also the shadow of Borges that hovers over this mesmerizing book... [and] one may detect a slight bow to the American macabre of E.A. Poe. Ogawa stands on the shoulders of giants, as another saying goes. But this collection may linger in your mind — it does in mine — as a delicious, perplexing, absorbing and somehow singular experience." —Alan Cheuse, NPR Sinister forces collide—-and unite a host of desperate characters—-in this eerie cycle of interwoven tales from Yoko Ogawa, the critically acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Elsewhere, an accomplished surgeon is approached by a cabaret singer, whose beautiful appearance belies the grotesque condition of her heart. And while the surgeon's jealous lover vows to kill him, a violent envy also stirs in the...

"Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching." – Paul Auster A publishing phenomenon in Japan and a heartwarming story that will change the way we all see math, baseball, memory, and each other She is a housekeeper by trade, a single mom by choice, shy, brilliant, and starting a new tour of duty in the home of an aging professor. He is the professor, a mathematical genius, capable of limitless kindness and intuitive affection, but the victim of a mysterious accident that has rendered him unable to remember anything for longer than eighty minutes. Root, the housekeepers ten-year-old son, combines his mothers sympathy with a sensitive curiosity all his own. Over the course of a few months in 1992, these three develop a profoundly affecting friendship, based on a shared love of mathematics and baseball, that will change each of their lives permanently. Chosen as the most popular book in Japan by readers and booksellers alike, The Gift of Numbers is Yoko Ogawas first novel to be published in English, and in the U.S.

SUMMARY:He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him. Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.