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.