Book Review: Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa
- translated by Alison Watts
Have you read a book that left you craving a dish that you have never had before? This book left me craving a Dorayaki- a Japanese confection consisting of two pancakes sandwiched with a sweet bean paste filling.
The story opens on Cherry blossom street, where a disillusioned Sentaro, makes Dorayakis in his Doraharu shop. Sentaro meets 76-year-old Tokue Yoshi one morning, when she comes to him asking for a job, even willing to take lower wages than usual. He respectfully dismisses her because of her age and appearance as he doesn’t think she can handle the heavy labour required in the stall. She persists again during another visit and leaves behind a Tupperware container with sweet bean paste, a key ingredient used in making Dorayakis. He reluctantly tastes it after she goes.
“Toku’s bean paste was like nothing he had ever tasted before. It had a rich aroma, and sweetness that spread across his palette. The substance he bought in plastic containers could not compare”
Making the decision to bring in Tokue Yoshi to make sweet bean paste for the Dorayakis becomes a catalyst for change in Sentaro’s life.
This is a sweet, short read, that is tragic and yet hopeful. When Tokue Yoshi’s past is revealed in the story, it broke my heart, but it also spoke about the resilience of the human spirit. Tokue’s attitude to her life despite the horrific hand she was dealt reminded me of this quote from Viktor Frankl’s book ‘Man Search for Meaning’.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
This book also served as an education into Japan’s unsettling history with Hansen’s disease, the stigma and isolation people faced on contracting it, the ruthless way they were separated from families overnight, never to see them again in many cases and social exclusion as people feared and distrusted them.
Even after the medication was discovered for a cure and the horrible exclusionary law was repealed, many people found it hard to integrate back into society as they were subject to discrimination and hence continued to live in sanitariums. In this story, even well-meaning Sentaro has a moment where he thinks he has made a mistake in visiting Tokue where she lives, and it may have cost him his health, despite his common sense telling him otherwise.
I loved reading the author’s note at the end where he tells us the reason behind writing this story. He talks about a much-admired philosophy in Japan (and I think in most parts of the world) where people are told right from a young age that their lives have no meaning unless they are useful members of society. He however found it hard to concur with this philosophy as he thought of a colleague’s son who died when he was just two years old or when he thought about the former Hansen’s patients living in sanatoriums, isolated from society for decades, long after they were cured, and the unjust law was repealed.
He says in the note “Some lives are all too brief, while others are a continuous struggle. I couldn’t help thinking that it was a brutal assessment of people's lives to employ usefulness to society as a yardstick by which to measure their value”
He, therefore, decided to write this book from a different perspective where the focus was on a greater force creating human beings rather than on human society itself.
An excerpt from the note below-
“Over the aeons the universe has nurtured life forms whose very awareness makes them involved in its continuous existence. Hence, we are all alike in having materialized on this Earth because that was what the universe so desired. The ill, the bedridden and children whose lives are over before they’ve barely begun; all are equal in their relationship to the universe. Anyone is capable of making a positive contribution to the world through simple observation, irrespective of circumstance.”
I kept thinking about the book and this philosophy long after I was done reading. Highly recommend this read.
-Anju