Sweet Bean Paste, a Novel by Durian Sukegawa

A written report by: Lau Yong Yan

Sweet Bean Paste (translated into English by Alison Watts) is a novel originally written in Japanese, about an ex-convict who works in a dorayaki shop and his friendship with an elderly lady with disfigured hands who specialized in making confectioneries.

There were three key characters in this novel that had caught my attention:

Tokue – She is separated from her family since young and has spent most of her life in the sanitorium. Despite living a sad life, but she has a determination to live her days to the fullest. Tokue develops the passion of making confectioneries while in the sanitorium and is a strong, diligent, patient women who never give up despite her hard life. Her struggles seem to make her stronger and more determined to make her life worth living.

Sentaro – The main character in the story, he works unenthusiastically in a dorayaki shop to pay off his debts. He has spent years in prison prior to the beginning of the story, and has a difficult relationship with his mother. He always thinks his whole life was a failure and that he is a disappointment to people around him. Despite this, he has a desire to prove to himself and people around him that he can be someone “useful” (but just does not know how). He has no hopes for his life until he met Tokue, whom encouraged, taught him valuable lessons, and helped him learn more about himself.

Sentaro’s boss – She is the wife of the previous owner of the dorayaki shop whom Sentaro owed money to. She represents the society’s prejudice and poor treatment towards social outcasts such as Sentaro and Tokue, judging them for their dark pasts or appearances that do fit what society thinks a normal people should be. Sentaro’s boss completely ignored the fact that Tokue had already recovered from her disease and is no longer contagious. She used Tokue’s past illness as a reason to force Sentaro fire Tokue because she dislikes the way Tokue looks and believes her presence would ruin the dorayaki business.

Do you know that the novel has a movie adaptation? Check it here:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4298958/

During the time I spent reading this novel, I had also ended up studying more about the history of leprosy in Japan.

I learned that in the past, just as what was written in the novel, all the people who had leprosy were forced to leave their homes and live in a sanitorium. They were forbidden by law to leave the place even after they had recovered.

It was only in the year 1996 when those laws were repealed – and even then, were they truly free? In the book, Tokue thought she can finally be united with her family after so long, only to receive a letter from her brother saying that it was better they did not meet. This echoed with the sentiments of many leprosy patients in real life, whose biggest problem was no longer their disease but the feeling of being unwanted as they had to survive in a society filled with so much prejudice and discrimination against them.

As much as we would find this cruel, we also cannot blame families for refusing to accept the patients back either, as many who allowed leprosy patients to return and live with them ended up shunned along with the patients – from losing their jobs to even being forced to move their homes nearly 20 times. This shows the sad reality of how the Japanese society during that period still disliked and would not treat them as normal people even though the government had changed the laws and an effective treatment method for the disease had been discovered nearly 40 years prior.

Here are the lessons I could learn after finishing this novel:

I learned to not judge someone by their appearance
The stereotype that old people could not work just as well as young people and the crooked fingers that scared and disgust people were what troubled Tokue the most. Sentaro too felt Tokue was not able to help and work for him at the beginning of the novel. Nevertheless, Tokue proved to Sentaro that despite her age and her disfigured fingers, she could make good red bean paste and work just like a normal person, if not even better.

I learned to appreciate the small pleasures in life.
No matter what good or bad things you have experienced in your life, I learned from the novel that “all experience adds up to a life lived as only you could.”

Some of us may have awful backstories just like the characters in Sweet Bean Paste, but we must not allow those to hold us back and treat each day as a nice new hopeful day. Being constantly stressed and unhappy about your current life is not going to improve the situation. So, we should appreciate all the simple things in life, both good and bad, as we enjoy and live life to the fullest. This is what that would make us happy and love the life we live.

I also realized I should learn how to listen
In the book, Tokue loves to listen to the nature and encourages Sentaro to do the same. This may seem weird to some you, but I think the “listening to nature” thing is not actually about listening to birds chirping or the trees, but about trying to listen to yourself and others as we try to understand them. We should stop moaning about your life, and take some time to listen to ourselves and our minds – this is what I believe is the way to learn, improve and respect ourselves.

Stop complaining, try to listen to others, to learn more about them and think from their perspective.

My final thoughts on the book:

While the plot and ending of Sweet Bean Paste were rather cliché, I still loved reading on the heart-warming friendship between Sentaro and Tokue. I love how their friendship started and blossomed in the novel, as well as the closeness shared between them despite the way they think and behave differently from each other. Overall, it was a short but well-written novel that I had enjoyed reading.

From Tokue, one can learn how even the simplest things could bring happiness if one would appreciate them. And from Sentaro, who was written just like us when we are in a slump, one can learn how one must continue to not give up even when things seemed to be out of out control – which can be done by trying to look at the positive things in life, as we start taking actions without complaining about our hardships.

Links for further reading:

Discover more from Language Arts Workshop - Penang