Books like The Housekeeper and the Professor
A young housekeeper goes to work for a former mathematics professor whose memory, since an accident, lasts only eighty minutes; each morning she and her ten-year-old son are strangers to him again, and he greets them with numbers.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Housekeeper and the Professor
Kitchen
A young Tokyo woman who has lost everyone is taken in by a boy and his trans mother, and cooks her way through the shape grief takes when it has nowhere to sit but a kitchen.
Sweet Bean Paste
Sentaro, an ex-convict working off a debt at a Tokyo dorayaki stall, reluctantly hires Tokue, a woman in her seventies with misshapen hands, and her homemade bean paste starts drawing customers to his counter.
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
When her boyfriend tells her he is marrying someone else, Takako quits her job and moves into the dusty room above her uncle Satoru's secondhand bookshop in Tokyo's Jimbocho book district, a place she has never cared about.
The Lantern of Lost Memories
In an old-fashioned photo studio between life and death, Mr Hirasaka helps the newly departed look back over their lives through a lantern of memories and step back into one moment to photograph it again.
The Forest of Wool and Steel
Tomura, a quiet boy from a mountain village in Hokkaido, hears a piano tuner at work in his school gym and decides to become one, apprenticing himself to a small piano shop.
Goodbye Tsugumi
Maria spends one last summer in the seaside town where she grew up, at the family inn that is about to close, with her beautiful, sickly cousin Tsugumi, whose tongue is as cruel as her health is fragile.
The Guest Cat
A couple in their thirties, both writers, rent a cottage in the grounds of an old Tokyo house, and a neighbour's cat named Chibi begins visiting, and then staying.
Strange Weather in Tokyo
A woman develops a tender relationship with her former high school teacher over sake and seasonal food.
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
Seventy very short stories Kawabata wrote across his life, few longer than two pages, of chance meetings, love, death and the turning seasons.
Territory of Light
Separated from her husband, a young woman moves with her two-year-old daughter into a fourth-floor Tokyo apartment flooded with light, and over twelve chapters, one for each month, tries to make a life there.
The Travelling Cat Chronicles
Satoru and Nana, the streetwise stray he took in, set off in a silver van across Japan to visit the old friends who might give Nana a home, for reasons Satoru keeps to himself.
The Great Passage
Mitsuya Majime, an awkward young publishing employee with a gift for words, is recruited to the dictionary department to help compile The Great Passage, a new dictionary its editors expect to take years.