Superficially, a main theme is love of food and food as symbolic mediator in Japanese society. But just like many a super hero, her special power – in this case her ability to conjure up great tasting bean paste and other sorts of confectionary – has emerged from an early scarring by trauma she has spent a lifetime to overcome. Tokue turns out to have been endowed with special super powers. As their awkward relationship blossoms, the business starts to pick up and thrive and their lives change.īut just when you start thinking that this story will turn out to be a sort of twee, Japanese version of Breaking Bad with Sentaro as Jesse and Tokue as Heisenberg, teaming up to cook up an all-conquering dorayaki empire, you’ll find out you’re sorely mistaken! It is a Lynchian Inland Empire that this novel explores: finding the meaning in a human life in the face of one’s disappointment at one’s unfulfilled potential.
Customers start to notice the difference between the insipid flavour of the processed stuff he has provided hitherto and this gorgeous, smooth, tenderly concoction, conjured up according to a recipe developed over 50 years. He invites her in to start training him in the making of proper dorayaki. He dismisses her at first, but she persists and once he has tasted the exquisite bean paste she’s left him in a tupperware container, he is won over. He is approached one day during cherry blossom season by a wizened old obaa-san woman called Tokue, who asks him for job. Sentaro is a bit of a loafer and jobsworth he’s only working in the shop to pay off debts and doesn’t even like dorayaki. The main character is Sentaro, a down-on-his-luck part-time worker who runs a dorayaki (bean paste pancake) shop on his own in Tokyo.
The novel starts in a comical vein like a classic ‘odd couple’ narrative but turns into something else: a poignant meditation on the generation gap, stigmatization in Japan, the perils of lazy prejudice in a stratifying society, the value of devotion to one’s craft and how we can find meaning in the mundane, no matter how tawdry or hemmed in our circumstances. ISBN-13: 978-1786071958 Review by Chris Arningĭurian Sukegawa’s Sweet Bean Paste is a tender story chronicling the unlikely bond between an ex con and an elderly lady with a shadowy past.
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