Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police

Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police

Yoko Ogawa has said that the reason she became a writer was reading the diary of Anne Frank as a teenager. Writers tell ourselves—and other people—stories about where our writing comes from, historical accounts that seem to us at least partially true at the time. Maybe we grew up in a storytelling family, or one where it was not possible to say the important things aloud. And then a writer comes along who says what we didn’t know we could say or tells stories that resonate with the truths we wish we could read. Although, after all my years of writing and teaching writing, it also seems to me that the urge to say what happened, to make sense of it or alter it, starts so early that we can’t find the beginnings. Maybe, then, we were already writers but we wake up to our awareness of this when we come across a writer whose particular urgent project touches us profoundly.

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Ron Nyren on Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor

Ron Nyren on Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor

(Guest post by Ron Nyren)

My father had an uncanny ability to manage numbers. He could add long strings of them in his head, as well as multiply and divide sizable figures without writing them down, skills that served him well in keeping the books for the family business, Nyren Brothers Florists, then later as troubleshooter for a wholesale florist, and finally as a real estate agent before he retired. He also served as treasurer for the church, the town’s garden club, and just about every other organization he belonged to. In his last few years, in his late 80s, when his short-term memory began to fail him, he patiently taught my mother to take over balancing the checkbook.

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