Sweet Bean Paste

by Durian Sukegawa

‘That’s what public opinion is. That’s why I can’t let you leave that canary here. Everyone’s afraid of bird flu these days. Ten years ago, maybe, but now people’d have a fit at the sight of a bird in a food and drink establishment.’

‘Apparently they put this hedge all round to stop patients getting out.’ ‘But that was in the old days, right?’ ‘It’s still here though, isn’t it?’ she responded. Wakana had been doing some research on the internet too.

Still they saw nobody. Apart from birdsong they heard nothing. ‘Sure is quiet here,’ Sentaro remarked to fill the silence. ‘Scary,’ was how Wakana chose to express it.

If Hansen’s disease was all but eradicated from Japan, what need was there for outlandish gear like that, he thought. No medical workers in the country had been infected through contact with patients. Why then didn’t the workers here wear ordinary clothes? He began to feel anxious about having brought a young girl like Wakana here.

‘Tokue.’ Sentaro spoke first. Tokue bobbed her head in greeting. ‘Oh, it’s been a long time since I saw your face,’ she said. ‘You, too, Wakana, dear.’ ‘I’m sorry it’s been so long,’ Sentaro answered.

Tokue sensed his discomfort and went on. ‘I married someone I met here. I’d already recovered, but it took a lot longer for my husband. Then he had a relapse…He had a hard life.’ ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

Just as we were starting to think we’d get by somehow…out of the blue…I never thought…One day I noticed a red lump on my thigh.’ She pointed to her right leg.

If he were honest, Sentaro did not feel like putting anything from that bag into his mouth. He was still shaken by Tokue’s story, and slightly shocked from seeing someone severely disfigured by Hansen’s disease close-up for the first time.

Sentaro took the biscuit and brought it to his mouth. It would be a lie to say he felt no hesitation, but the moment it touched his lips the rich citrus aroma dispelled all doubt. The aroma intensified once he bit into a sliver of almond. ‘Mm, this is interesting,’ he said.

‘For treatment – such as it was – we didn’t have drugs like Promin at first.’ Promin: this was the name of the drug used for treating Hansen’s disease. Sentaro and Wakana both knew from their reading on the internet the change it brought about in ending a long history of suffering.

‘There were people with nodules, big lumps and scabs – that’s the kind of thing this illness does to you. Some had their fingers fall off, others their nose. It wasn’t an unusual sight before the medicine became available. It was dreadful seeing people suffering like that, knowing that’s what would happen to me eventually. I was terrified.’

‘My husband,’ she answered. ‘The last time I was up there, I was having a little cry by myself when somebody spoke to me. The man who became my husband.’

‘In the old days, the fire truck wouldn’t come here if there was a fire. Police wouldn’t come if there was a crime. That’s how isolated we were. We had to do everything for ourselves. We formed our own neighbourhood associations and even made our own money. We had currency you couldn’t use anywhere except here.’

‘Yes, it’s been going a long time. We had to do something to make life better. With this disease the eyesight gets weaker and sensation in the fingers and toes is gradually lost. But for some reason sensation in the tongue is the last to be affected. Can you imagine what it’s like for someone who can’t see or feel, to taste something sweet?’

‘What’s a charnel house?’ Wakana asked. ‘A place to put bones. We don’t have graves. My husband, Yoshiaki, is here too. Free from pain at last. I’m sure he’s dreaming of his favourite bean-jam buns.’

‘When the day came we were finally allowed to leave this place, I thought I could return home. But it was difficult. My mother and brothers were dead by then. I got in contact with my sister but…she begged me not to go back, so I couldn’t. I had nowhere to go back to. Yoshiaki didn’t have any family who’d take him back either.

The bones of more than 4,000 people are in here. When the law changed, for one happy moment we all thought we could go home. But more than a dozen years have passed since then and almost no one has come forward to take us back. The world hasn’t changed. It’s just as cruel as it always was.’

Sentaro felt a tugging sensation at his back. He turned around and saw the stone cairn at the charnel house. Four thousand souls. Four thousand people who never went home. He felt their eyes boring down on him from above.

Sentaro could not understand where his anxiety sprang from. Was Wakana all right? He fervently hoped she was not sick too. Sentaro put his hand on his forehead and felt the burning heat. He recalled Wakana keeping her face down and averted the whole time on their way back. They were both shaken by the day’s experience.

Sentaro knew immediately who she was; a fourteen-year-old girl who had been brought here, not understanding why; the young Tokue, who wept and wept until she had no more tears to shed. Sentaro stood behind her trying to think of words of comfort. But he knew that there was nothing he could say that would be of any help.

In spite of everything, Sentaro’s sweet bean paste showed signs of improving. A number of customers had remarked on how much better it was. He had cut back on drinking and was getting up early again to make the bean paste.

For the last few years all he had wanted was to escape the grind of this work – standing over a hot griddle every day – but now he could not bring himself to agree to close down Doraharu. He didn’t really understand the reason why. All he knew was how strongly he felt about not wanting the shop to close.

When I make sweet bean paste I observe closely the colour of the adzuki beans’ faces. I take in their voices. That might mean imagining a rainy day or the beautiful fine weather that they have witnessed. I listen to their stories of the winds that blew on their journey to me.

It’s my belief that everything in this world has its own language. We have the ability to open up our ears and minds to anything and everything. That could be someone walking down the street, or it could be the sunshine or the wind. I realize I may have seemed like a nagging old woman to you, and I regret that for all I said I couldn’t pass this vital message on to you.

In any case, I feel sure that you are capable of creating your own dorayaki. I’ve been making sweet bean paste for a long time but that doesn’t mean you have to do everything the way I do. It’s important to be bold and decisive. When you can say with certainty that you have found your style of dorayaki, that will be the start of a new day for you. I firmly believe this. Please have the courage to go your own way. I know that you can do it.

There was a time when I couldn’t go out into the world either, but for a very different reason than you. As a rule, I don’t tell people about it, but I think it’d be good to tell you now. A few years before I started working at Doraharu I broke the law for no particular reason. I went to jail as a result and spent time looking up at a small patch of sky.

And there was something else too, something far more important to Sentaro: Tokue’s sweet bean paste. He was determined to carry on making it, because if he did not, it would disappear from the world. Apart from its merits as a bean paste, Sentaro thought of it as testimony to the life of a remarkable woman called Tokue Yoshii.

Sentaro was shocked by Tokue’s appearance and tried not to let his agitation show. Though it was only just over a month since they had last met, she looked as if years had passed. She returned his smile readily, but her eyes were hollow and her cheeks sunken.

‘The whole mess was all my doing. It was hard especially for my mother – I did something that couldn’t be undone.’ ‘But you paid your dues. In prison.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then you have to start over.’

‘Well, to tell the truth, there’s nothing more I can teach you about making bean paste. It’s up to you now – just do what you want. Have confidence in yourself.’ Tokue’s eyes glistened. ‘You can do it, Sentaro,’ she said.

‘You’ve almost paid it all back, you know. I’ll let you off the rest. Let’s do this with good grace, Sentaro. There are times in life when we have to make changes.’ Sentaro said nothing for a while. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, next month we make a new start. Got it?’

People’s lives never stay the same colour forever. There are times when the colour of life changes completely.

I’m nearly at the end of my time, and because of this there are things I know. I had to spend my whole life living with the consequences of Hansen’s disease. Looking back on what life was like when

They stood outside the shop self-consciously making remarks such as ‘It’s been a while’ or ‘I suddenly felt like eating a dorayaki’. Sentaro merely responded with a smile.

Nearly a month had passed since Sentaro had quit working at Doraharu. He had been holed up in his flat ever since, oblivious to the spring weather and only going out to get food from the convenience store. He spent the days sitting around, indifferent to the passage of time.

Sentaro stared at the dingy wall from the corner of his eye. At the end of the day, he was a loser. He might as well face up to it; that was the only conclusion he could draw. He should just string a rope up in here and get it over with.

The day he had asked the owner over to hand in his resignation, and the money he still owed her, she’d thrown one insult after another at him, calling him, amongst other things, a criminal who knew nothing about gratitude.

‘Dorayaki, fresh dorayaki.’ Sentaro spoke the words again and felt something roll down his cheek. He clenched his fists, drew a deep breath and gritted his teeth. I know you can get through...That’s what Tokue had written. He’d let her down already. He hadn’t kept any of his promises.

A petal fluttering through the air penetrates his chest, becoming a momentary beam of light before it disappears. But no, it is not gone. A little bit salty with a lovely smell of flowers…The words linger and echo inside him. Suddenly the cherry blossoms all around seem to expand and Sentaro blinks.

The flavour opens up in his mouth like a flower. A fresh trail of salt trickles down his cheek. A little bit salty with a lovely smell of flowers… Exactly as the girl said it would be. The saltiness and aroma interact with perfect union. This is it.

‘The saltiness is just enough so you can still appreciate the taste of the flower. I could put one or two flowers in dorayaki batter…’

‘You know Tokue wasn’t allowed to leave here for a long time, so I guess she understands what it feels like to be a bird in a cage. If he can fly, I think it might be better to let him go. If he has somewhere to go for food I’m sure he could survive in the woods here.’

‘We came to see Tokue. I only just sent the postcard to say we’re coming so it might not have arrived yet.’ ‘Ahh…’ Miss Moriyama covered her misshapen lips with one hand as she attempted to get words out. Then, at a complete loss, she closed her eyes for a moment.

‘Dear Toku passed away.’ Sentaro’s jaw dropped. He jumped to his feet. Wakana made a startled movement. Sentaro felt as if an invisible fist of all the unseen forces in the world – wind, time and space – had suddenly struck him in the chest. He made stuttering sounds, unable to form words.

Miss Moriyama did not take her wizened eyes away from his face. ‘Toku gave me your contact address before. But I don’t know where it went. So last week I went to the shop, and found it was an okonomiyaki shop now. I asked the young man there if he knew your phone number, but he said he had no idea. I was in quite a pickle, I didn’t know what to do.’

‘I’m so sorry’ past his lips. ‘It was ten days ago. When she passed away.’ ‘It can’t be true, it can’t be true,’ Wakana repeated pleadingly.

‘I went to see her at home the day before. She looked exhausted. But she insisted it was only fever and didn’t want to go to the clinic. So I stayed with her. That was when she gave me a letter, just in case. I told her if she was that bad she should ask you to come here, but she didn’t like the idea. A letter would be fine, she said, whatever happened.’

‘Toku thought of you like a son, you know. It was pneumonia.’ She spoke bluntly, but her tone was not accusing.

‘Can I ask, err, about Tokue’s—’ His lips shook as he tried to get it out. ‘Tokue’s—’ he tried again, but broke down. Miss Moriyama pressed her fingers to the corners of her eyes. Then she answered the question Sentaro had been trying to ask. ‘She’s…she was laid to rest in the charnel house. With her husband.’

A familiar birdcage was on the floor next to the window, but there was no Marvy inside. Sentaro darted a furtive glance at Wakana when he noticed. She was staring at the empty birdcage with tear-filled eyes.