Sweet Bean Paste

”Bean paste is all about feeling, young man.”

A weirdly calming read about an ex-convict’s dorayaki shop and the mysterious elderly Tokue he hires for basically peanuts. I say weirdly calming, because this book went places that I wasn’t expecting from the summary. I had some serious mood whiplash moments while reading this short, sweet, ultimately sad little novel.

Ex-convict Sentaro runs a dorayaki shop to pay off a debt. He’s making a rough go of it initially, because while he makes the pancakes from scratch, he buys pre-made sweet bean paste (name drop!) rather than make it from scratch. As a result his sweets are middling at best, and he doesn’t get much foot traffic as a result. Tokue, elderly woman with strangely twisted, ugly hands, starts hanging around his shop trying to get Sentaro to hire her. At first he refuses, but it’s only when she names some minuscule sum of money as her wage in exchange for making her sweet bean paste from scratch for him that he reluctantly hires her on. What follows is the two of them turning the shop around–until we start learning more about Tokue and her past.

I went into this blind, so when Tokue’s big reveal came, I was sort of floored. Leprosy was definitely not on my list of potential baggage. I was thinking more like dementia or homelessness or something. Regardless, this ended up being a pretty touching read for something so mood whiplash-y. I do sort of wish we find out how Sentaro ends up; I was rooting for him to open his own shop modeled after Tokue’s sweet bean paste, but the book ends before we get that far.

Still, a good, quick read. I sort of wish I had my own dorayaki to eat while reading this.

I don't even know what I was expecting when I started reading this, but what I got is definitely not it. 'Sweet Bean Paste' is a very interesting book while keeping that mild, heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time, quality that I got used to in Japanese books.

I liked the plot, I got to read about a subject I did not read about before. And I liked the characters, I liked them from the first meeting.

There is something about Japanese arts that's very specific, but very hard to explain. For me at least. This is valid here too, in this book. I got a specific vibe from it that I can't get from a book written by any other author besides Japanese. But enough about that, this book is simply great and I recommend it.

I started reading this book at least partly because I absolutely love Dorayaki (pancakes filled with sweet red bean paste). To be fair I love most sweets, so this is a low bar. And while it starts quite whimsically, the story soon changes and highlights something I never knew anything about - the treatment of Hansens's Disease (leprosy) sufferers in Japan.

Up until 1996 people that had suffered from the illness, even if they had been cured for decades with no risk of any transmission, were locked away in sanatoriums. This is a large part of what's behind this story, and it also serves as a way to more generally question the value of a life, and the notion that a life should or could be measured by its usefulness to society as a whole.