Yôko Ogawa - The Gift of Numbers aka The Housekeeper and the Professor

At first, it was just a small distraction, but it quickly became an obsession. Only a few people know the mystery concealed in this formula, and the rest of us go to our graves without even suspecting there is a secret to be revealed. But by some whim of fate, I had found it, and now knocked at the door, asking to be let in. Though I had never suspected it, from the moment I'd been dispatched by the Akebono Housekeeping Agency, I had been on a mission toward that door…

"Do I look like the Professor?" I asked Root, my hand pressed to my temple and a pencil clenched in my fingers. That day, I had covered the back of every flyer and handbill in the house, but I'd made no progress.

"No, not a bit," Root said. "When the Professor's solving a problem, he doesn't talk to himself the way you do, and he doesn't pull out his hair. His body's there but his mind goes somewhere else. And besides," he added, "his problems are a lot harder!"

"I know! But whose problem is this anyway? Maybe you could stop reading your baseball books for a minute and help me."

"But you're three times as old as I am! And besides, it's a crazy problem anyway."

"Showing the factors was progress. That was thanks to the Professor, wasn't it?"

"I guess so," said Root, looking at my work on the backs of the advertisements and nodding as though he found everything in proper order.

"I think you're on the right track," he said at last.

"Some help you are!" I laughed.

"Better than nothing," he said, turning back to his book.

Since he was very small, he'd often had to console me when I came home from work in tears-when I'd been accused of stealing, or called incompetent, or had the food I'd made thrown away right in front of me. "You're beautiful, Momma," he'd say, his voice full of conviction, "It'll be okay." This was what he always said when he comforted me. "I'm a beauty?" I would ask, and he'd say, feigning astonishment, "Sure you are. Didn't you know?" More than once I'd pretended to be crying just to hear these words; and he'd always play along willingly.

"But you know what I think?" he said suddenly. "When you're adding up the numbers, 10 is odd man out."

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, 10's the only one with two places."

He was right, of course. I had analyzed the numbers in many ways, but had not thought about how each number was special, different. When I looked at them again, it seemed terribly strange that I'd never noticed how odd 10 looked lined up against the others-the only one among them that could not be written without picking up the pencil.

"If you got rid of ten, you'd have a number in the center spot, which might be good."

"What do you mean, 'center spot'?"

"You'd know if you came to the last Parents' Day. We were doing gymnastics-that's my best sport-and in the middle of the exercise the teacher said, 'Double lines, face center.' The guy in the middle held up his arms and the rest of us lined up facing him. There were nine of us, so the guy in fifth place was the center, and the lines were even. For 10 it doesn't work. If you add just one guy, you don't have a center."

So now I tried leaving 10 aside and lining up the rest of the numbers. I circled five in the center, with four numbers before it and four after. The 5 stood, arms proudly extended, enjoying the attention of all the others.

And at that moment I experienced a kind of revelation for the first time in my life, a sort of miracle. In the midst of a vast field of numbers, a straight path opened before my eyes. A light was shining at the end, leading me on, and I knew then that it was the path to enlightenment.

The radio came back from the repair shop on Friday, the twenty-fourth of April, the day the Tigers were scheduled to play the Dragons. We put it on the center of the table and sat around it. Root twisted the knobs, and the broadcast of the game crackled out from the static. The signal was weak, but there was no doubt it was the baseball game-and the first sign of life from the outside world that had made its way into the house since my arrival. We let out a little cheer.

"I had no idea you could get baseball on this radio," said the Professor.

"Of course! You can get it on any radio."

"My brother bought it for me a long time ago, for practicing English conversation. I thought it would only pick up English."

"So you've never listened to the Tigers?" Root said.

"No, and I haven't got a TV, either…," murmured the Professor, as if confessing something awful. "I've never seen a baseball game."

"I don't believe it!" Root blurted out, nearly shouting.

"I know the rules, though," the Professor said, a bit defensively. But Root was not to be appeased.

"How can you call yourself a Tigers fan?"

"But I am-a big fan. When I was in college, I went to the library at lunch to read the sports pages. But I did more than just read about baseball. You see, no other sport is captured so perfectly by its statistics, its numbers. I analyzed the data for the Hanshin players, their batting averages and ERAs, and by tracking the changes, even miniscule shifts, I could picture the flow of the games in my head."

"And that was fun?"

"Of course it was. Even without the radio, I could keep every detail fixed in my mind: Enatsu's first victory as a pro in 1967-he beat the Carp with ten strikeouts; the game in 1973 when he pitched an extra-innings no-hitter and then hit a walk-off home run himself." Just at that moment, the announcer on the radio mentioned the name of the Tigers starting pitcher, Kasai. "So when is Enatsu scheduled to pitch?" the Professor asked.

"He's a little farther on in the rotation," Root answered without missing a beat. It surprised me to see him acting so grown-up. We'd promised that where Enatsu was concerned, we'd do anything to keep up the illusion. Still, it made us uncomfortable to lie to the Professor, and it was hard to know whether it was really in his best interest. But we could not bear to upset him again.

"We can tell him that Enatsu's back in the dugout, or that he's throwing in the bullpen," Root had said.

Since Enatsu had retired long before Root was born, he'd gone to the library to find out about him. He learned that he had a career record of 206 wins, 158 losses, and 193 saves, with 2,987 strikeouts. He'd hit a home run in his second at bat as a pro; he had short fingers for a pitcher. He'd struck out his great rival, Sadaharu Oh, more than any other pitcher, but he'd also surrendered the most home runs to him. In the course of their rivalry, however, he'd never hit Oh with a pitch. During the 1968 season, he set a world record with 401 strikeouts, and after the 1975 season (the year the Professor's memory came to an end), he'd been traded to the Nankai Hawks.

Root had wanted to know more about Enatsu, so he would seem more real to both of them as they listened to the cheers on the radio. While I had been struggling with the "homework" problem, he had been seeing to the Enatsu problem. Then one day, as I was flipping through a copy of Baseball Players Illustrated that he'd brought home from the library, I was stunned to find a picture of Enatsu, and see on his uniform the number 28. When he'd graduated from Osaka Gakuin and joined the Tigers, he'd been offered the three available numbers: 1, 13, and 28. He'd chosen 28. Enatsu had played his whole career with a perfect number on his back!

That evening, after dinner, we presented our solution. We stood before the Professor, pen and paper in hand, and bowed.

"This is the problem you gave us," said Root. "Find the sum of the numbers from 1 to 10 without adding them." He cleared his throat and then, just as we'd arranged the night before, I held the notebook while he wrote the numbers 1 to 9 in a line, adding 10 farther down on the page. "We already know the answer. It's 55. I added them up and that's what I got. But you didn't care about the answer."