Sweet Bean Paste

by Durian Sukegawa

All the time he had ever squandered in his life seemed to be clinging to his footsteps, dragging him down.

Same.

But it wasn’t just a question of what to do, he wanted nothing strongly enough to move him to action.

do…I cried and screamed at the top of my voice – why did this have to happen to me?

‘Mm, tuile!’ ‘Twill?’ said Sentaro. ‘A French biscuit, very thin and crispy,’ Tokue replied, holding one out each to Sentaro and Wakana. ‘It’s got almond and orange in it. Very easy to make.’

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.’

What were the forces that played with this life? If she were being toyed with out of spite, at some point it would end, and she could move on. For example if public opinion were against her, times change, and eventually she could walk in the sun again one day. But who or what would want to torment a girl of only fourteen for the rest of her life? The thought was oppressive. Of course…it had to be the gods who were behind it all. The gods who whispered in her ear that she was better off not being born. The gods who declared she must suffer her whole life. What did Tokue think about life once she understood this? How was she going to live out the rest of it? She was just a girl, quietly sobbing her heart out.

One thing I can do in Tenshoen is sniff the wind and listen to the murmur of the trees. I pay attention to the language of things in this world that don’t use words. That’s what I call Listening, and I’ve been doing it for sixty years now.

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.

He did not know when or why his fall had begun, but he sensed the seeds of it had always been in him, ever since he was small. It was nothing sudden.

Sentaro slowly turns his head to gaze in rapture at each and every tree. Blossom surrounds him on all sides, as if he is at the centre of a deep, sparkling lake. He senses the full force of emotion that has been dormant in the trees all year, waiting for this once-a-year explosion of joy: their pure, unadulterated happiness.

energy seemed to radiate from trees swaying in the wind. While I was alone on that path in the woods, I came face-to-face with the moon. And oh, what a beautiful moon it was! I was enchanted. It made me forget everything I had suffered because of this illness, about being shut up in here and never going out. Then next thing, I thought I heard a voice that sounded very much like the moon whispering to me. It said: I wanted you to see me. That’s why I shine like this. From then on I began to see everything differently. If I were not here, this full moon would not be here. Neither would the trees. Or the wind. If my view of the world disappears, then everything that I see disappears too. It’s as simple as that.

You might think I’m deluded, but this idea changed me. I began to understand that we were born in order to see and listen to the world. And that’s all this world wants of us. It doesn’t matter that I was never a teacher or a member of the workforce, my life had meaning.

Miss Moriyama paused a few beats. ‘I did as she said, and tried to listen. I put my ears up close to the adzuki beans, and I had every intention of trying my best. But you know, I didn’t hear a thing. No bean-talk. What about you, Mr Tsujii? Did you ever hear the beans’ voices?’ Sentaro kept walking in silence a few moments. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But I think she meant we should approach the beans as if we could hear their voices.’

‘I don’t want to disappoint you, but Toku herself said at the time that she couldn’t actually hear the voices of beans. But if you live in the belief that they can be heard, then someday you might be able to hear them. She said that was the only way for us to live, to be like the poets. That’s what she said. If all you ever see is reality, you just want to die. The only way to get over barriers, she said, is to live in the spirit of already being over them.’

I began with the concept of a greater force that created human beings, rather than examining human society per se; the idea that we have been nurtured by the universe to prove its existence. If there is no single conscious mind capable of doing this, the existence of the universe itself becomes unverifiable. It cannot exist. Over the aeons the universe has nurtured life forms whose very awareness makes them involved in its continued existence. Hence we are all alike in having materialized on this Earth because that was what the universe so desired. The ill, the bed-ridden, and children whose lives are over before they’ve barely begun; all are equal in their relationship to the universe. Anyone is capable of making a positive contribution to the world through simple observation, irrespective of circumstance.