Richard Pelham

What you need to know about this novel: it’s set in Japan and the original was written in Japanese. There is a housekeeper who is employed to clean and cook for an elderly mathematics professor. She is a single mother with a 10-year-old son, known in the story as ‘Root’. The intrigue in the plot is the professor’s unique condition – since he was involved in a traffic accident some 30 years ago, the span of his memory has been limited to 80 minutes. As you’d imagine, this creates quite a challenging and unusual scenario. Indeed, all of the professor’s previous housekeepers had, for unstated reasons, left his employment after only a brief period. Each morning, the professor is effectively meeting his housekeeper for the first time, not having any recollection of the happenings of yesterday. He keeps notes pinned to his clothes to remind him of the most important facts that can’t stay in his mind (the most prominent of which is ‘my memory only lasts 80 minutes’). This way, he knows that h...