PICADOR

From Akutagawa Award-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent.

In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet, seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for.

He is a brilliant math professor with a peculiar problem: ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the professor and the housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.