The Gift of Numbers by Yōko Ogawa Page A

I sat down in front
of him and bowed my head.
    "I'm sorry," I said. "It was wrong of me to doubt the Professor,
even for a moment. I'm sorry and I apologize."
    I thought he might ignore me, but he turned and looked at me
with a very serious expression. He sat up straight, picking at the
end of his bandage.
    "All right, I accept. But I'll never forget what happened." And
at that, we shook hands.
    It was only two stitches, but even after he'd grown up, he still
had the scar between his thumb and forefinger—proof of how
much the Professor had cared about him.
     
    One day while I was straightening the shelves in the Professor's
study I came across a cookie tin buried under a pile of mathematics
books. I gingerly pulled off the rusted lid, thinking I'd find moldy
sweets, but, to my surprise, the box was filled with baseball cards.
    There were hundreds of them, packed tightly into the large tin,
and it was clear that the collection had been treasured by its owner.
The cards were spotless, protected from fingerprints and dirt in individual
cellophane wrappers. Not one was out of place nor was
there a single bent corner or crease. Hand-lettered dividers labeled
the players by position—"Pitchers," "Second Basemen," "Left
Fielders"—and each section was in alphabetical order. And to a
man, they were all Hanshin Tigers. They were perfectly preserved,
but the pictures and player bios on them were quite old. Most of
the photos were in black and white, and while I could follow a few
of the references—"Yoshio Yoshida, the modern-day Mercury," or
"the Zatopekesque pitching of Minoru Maruyama"—I was lost
when it came to the "diabolic rainbow ball of Tadashi Wakabayashi,"
or "the incomparable Sho Kageura."
    One player had been given special treatment: Yutaka Enatsu.
Instead of being filed by position, he had a separate section all to
himself. While the other cards were covered in cellophane,
Enatsu's were protected by stiff plastic sheaths.
    There were numerous Enatsu cards, depicting him in various
poses, but this was not the potbellied Enatsu I knew. In these
cards he was trim and young and, of course, wearing the uniform
of the Hanshin Tigers.
    Born May 15, 1948, in Nara Prefecture. Throws left, bats
left. h:179cm. w:90kg. Graduated Osaka Gakuin High School,
1967; drafted 1st by Hanshin. Following year, broke Sandy
Koufax's record (382) for most strikeouts in a Major League
season with 401. Struck out 9 consecutive batters in the 1971
All-Star Game (Nishinomiya), 8 failed to make contact. 1973
season, pitched no-hitter. "The Lofty Lefty." "Super Southpaw."
    Enatsu's player profile and statistics appeared on the backs of
the cards in tiny print. Here he was, glove on his knee, reading the
signals. Or in full windup. Or again, at the end of the pitch, eyes
boring into the catcher's mitt. Enatsu on the mound, his fierce
stance like a Deva King guarding a temple. And always on his uniform,
the perfect number 28.
    I returned the cards to the box and pressed the lid down as
carefully as I'd taken it off.
    Hidden farther back behind the shelves, I found a stack of
dusty notebooks. Judging from the discoloration of the paper and
ink, they were nearly as old as the baseball cards. Long years of
pressure from the tightly packed books had loosened the string
holding the thirty or so folders together, and the covers were
warped and bent.
    I flipped through page after page, but I found no Japanese—
just numbers, symbols, and letters of the alphabet. Mysterious
geometric forms were followed by equally strange curves and
graphs, all the Professor's work. The handwriting was younger
and more vigorous, but the ribbonlike fours and the slanted fives
were unmistakable.
    There is nothing more shameful for a housekeeper than to rummage
through her employer's personal property. But the exquisite
beauty of the notebooks made me oblivious. The formulas snaked
across the pages by some logic of their own, ignoring the lines on
the paper; and just when