Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa Review

Sentaro is an ex-con working off a debt in a dorayaki shop (dorayaki is Japanese confectionery where two pancakes sandwich sweet Azuki red bean paste). But business is slow. One day a mysterious elderly woman called Tokue appears with her own recipe for dorayaki - and suddenly business is booming! But who is Tokue really and why are her hands so gnarled… 

Durian Sukegawa’s novel Sweet Bean Paste wasn’t bad. The premise is kinda fluffy and the cover reinforces that impression so I was expecting a light-hearted, fun read where the old lady fixes the dude’s messed up life, Mary Poppins-style. He’s this failed writer who wants to get out of making dorayaki and I thought that would be explored, he’d find success, happiness and maybe even love too along the way or something. 

None of that happens! I mean, it’s fairly light up until the halfway point and then the story goes in a radically darker direction: exploring Japan’s former treatment of people suffering from leprosy?! Uh… ok?? I suppose it was noble of Sukegawa to highlight this hidden era of Japanese history, not to mention informative. 

I didn’t love it though. Not because it was unexpected but because that kind of serious subject matter can only be handled one way and so the story gets deeper and deeper into a maudlin tone, almost to a gratuitous degree and to the exclusion of everything else. It was like wallowing in sadness by the end. Half my family are Japanese, I’ve been to the country many times, and, I swear, I strongly think that weepy sentimentality/self-pity/martyrdom is almost part of the national character! The number of guilt-trips I’ve had from my mother alone at this point isn’t even funny… (hehe)

The book doesn’t have the most driving story, or much of one at all really, the ending was unsatisfactory as were parts of the story left unexplored - why mention Sentaro was a failed writer if you do nothing about that? Still, it’s well-written, easy to read, mildly enjoyable in its gentle pleasantness - I did find myself rooting for the dorayaki shop to succeed in spite of that being pointless in the end - and the characters were likeable enough. 

Overall, a birruva mixed bag for me. I didn’t dislike it but I’m not recommending it very strongly or going to be looking for more books by this author. And I think, for anyone interested in picking this up, it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s a much heavier emotional read than it might seem at first.