The housekeeper is soon a fully-fledged mathematics junkie:

I thought of the professor whenever I saw a prime number — which, as it turned out, was almost everywhere I looked. Price tags at the supermarket, house numbers above doors, on bus schedules or the expiration date on a package of ham . . . On the face of it, these numbers faithfully played their official roles, but in secret they were primes and I knew that was what gave them their true meaning.

As somebody who also felt ill at the sight of a maths text book at school, I didn’t quite share the housekeeper’s enthusiasm for her new subject. There are also severe narrative drawbacks in placing a character with anterograde amnesia at the centre of a story. But Ogawa largely overcomes these through the clarity of her prose and the originality of her approach. Still, it’s extraordinary that this light, though undoubtedly touching Pygmalion story has sold two and a half million copies in its native Japan.

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