![]() ![]() 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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