Sweet Bean Paste: The International Bestseller

Great story, emotional, nice twists, and I learned a lot.

With a calm beginning and a lamenting end, Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa is a contemporary fiction that is perfect for teenagers. It suits readers who enjoy a peaceful and heartwarming story about food with a splash of Japanese history with prejudice towards different groups of people. Within this story, the expressive details on the paste and the significant themes emphasise how captivating this book is. Through making luscious confectioneries that create a close bond between the two main characters, each troubled by problems, this book includes a sweet idea that illustrates how people should contribute to the world.The story begins with Sentaro, who has a criminal record and works at a dorayaki shop called Doraharu. Although he didn’t like the job, he still continued to do it since he needed to pay back the debts he owed to the owner of Doraharu. Every day, he would carelessly make dorayaki – pancakes with sweet bean paste – inside but he is failing to gain profit since he doesn’t make the best bean paste. Then, he met Tokue Yoshii, an eldery woman that wants to work at this shop. At first, Sentaro didn’t want her to work in the shop due to her disfigured hands, but soon let her join after tasting the delicious sweet bean paste she made. This slowly changed the shop’s sales and created a close friendship between the two through sharing things about their past. Through the conflicts in the book along with the information about Tokue and how it relates to Sentaro’s own past, it made Sentaro realise that making dorayaki is not just to repay his debts.One of the things that makes readers fall in love with this book is the attention-grabbing sensory descriptions of the food. In particular, there were several paragraphs on making the sweet bean paste. The delicious descriptions of the paste is expressed so eloquently that the reader can have a vivid imagination of it. The story said “Every bean sparkled, transforming the atmosphere of the kitchen. Sentaro felt as if he were looking at a living creature rather than food” (22). This sentence makes the reader visualise how special and unique the beans were and feel that they are also seeing the beans in person. There was also personification regarding cooking the beans, such as “The aroma seemed to leap up at him, as if it were alive, racing through his nose to the back of his head” (33). This description makes the reader think that the paste they made is delicious and want to make sweet bean paste as well. In addition, these descriptions also unexpectedly showed how to make sweet bean paste. Some parts of the story had detailed steps, such as simmering, adding water at certain points of the water boiling, and stirring the mixture upright with a wooden spatula. There are also tips such as “If [the beans have] already split it can affect [the] quality [of the paste]” (24) as well as “Despite all the simmering, every single bean still looked firm and taut, with no wrinkles” (26) to describe what the end result would look like. Although this book doesn’t include the actual recipe for making sweet bean paste, readers can try to use the paragraphs to make their own dorayaki.Another thing that readers enjoy is the book’s central theme which is that everyone can contribute to society by listening to and observing the world around them. However, the theme was presented so directly that the story became less interesting. The reader knows what the whole book is about with nothing else to think of. In spite of that, the theme is still significant to the story and the readers. It was applied to Sentaro through Tokue telling him that although he isn’t very successful in life, his life still has a purpose. This later helped Sentaro to find that his purpose in life is not just paying back the debts through making dorayaki. In addition, this book showed how important listening to the world is since “we have been nurtured by the universe to prove its existence” (216). This is because if people don’t use their senses to interact with the world, then the world does not exist to them. Since everyone can interact with the world using their senses, the book shows that people who failed in life can still have a purpose in life as “we were born in order to see and listen to the world” (199) rather than everyone else’s standards of being a useful member of society. This theme overall tells people who are struggling in life or have illnesses they have to go through that their lives are still meaningful and have a purpose of interacting with the world around them.Overall, the story with detailed descriptions of the confectionery reveals that the purpose of life is not just being a useful member of society. The detailed and expressive descriptions of the beans made the book appealing to read. The enthralling plot also illustrates how everyone’s life is meaningful, no matter what negative thing happened to them in the past. Thus this idea gives hope to those who are feeling like their life is useless to society. These are the reasons why Sweet Bean Paste is a comforting book that has a significant idea which adjusts how people look at society’s standards and the world.

An easy holiday read. Happy and sad book. Will read again.

arrived in good condition

I seriously did not expect to love this book that much. I love Japanese literature,so I ordered this one asap. The story has unexpected twists and I could not put the book down. The characters are extremely interesting and I got attached to them very quickly. Some questions stayed unanswered but other aspects of the story covered those questions well. I cried. I cried with the characters. I felt happy when they were happy. I fell sorrow and grief where they felt them too. I felt every smell and taste of this delicious food the author talks about. The philosophy of the story is amazing and changed the way I see life.

😭very touching !!