I found myself deeply moved while reading Durian Sukegawa's 'Sweet Bean Paste' (originally published in 2013), 「あん」ドリアン助川, translated into English by Alison Watts and published in 2017. (Reviews here, here and here.)
Protagonist Sentaro has a criminal record for drugs, drinks too much and can't seem to do anything right in life. He runs a dorayaki stand for his boss. Then high school girl Wakana comes into the picture, as an accessory. I wish she's given a larger role.
Tokue Yoshii is the elderly seventy-year-old woman who suffered from leprosy, recovered but didn't have anywhere else to go even after the leprosy law was repealed in 1996 and she was free to move about between the public spaces and the sanatorium at Tenshoen where she had lived for six decades.
Sentaro and elderly Tokue's paths crossed when she answered his ad for part-time help. He obviously didn't know anything about leprosy or Hansen's disease despite seeing her crippled fingers and a side of her face paralyzed. She taught him how to make sweet bean paste (from adzuki beans) from scratch instead of using pre-made paste. His dorayaki stand grew popular. But he was forced to ask her to leave when people told his boss about the help and leprosy. The boss clearly was prejudiced against leprosy sufferers, even the fully recovered ones, and didn't want her to work there at all.
We follow Sentaro's struggles and learnt of Tokue's deep pain and suffering. We are given a glimpse into the sanatorium where Tokue lives. We hear her story, and her life. She isn't alone. While she doesn't have family anymore, Sentaro and Wakana have come to know her, and remember her. In Tokue's death, she brought warmth and hope to these two young adults.
I remember watching a film that collaborated with this book and its author — Naomi Kawase's film 'An' (2015) / 河瀨直美「あん」原作：ドリアン助川. The film tells the book's plot, which features the story of an elderly woman with leprosy who has suffered lifelong discrimination but quietly perseveres and gently inspires those around her, beginning with her talent for making an (あん, red-bean paste).
Of course this is much more than about adzuki beans and delicious dorayaki どらやき. I have no interest in eating dorayaki before reading this book, and it certainly doesn't make me want to go out and get some. While I'm no critic of an, I know a can turn out fantastic in the mixing bowl of a seasoned baker who doesn't make it too sweet. I've tasted excellent dorayaki in the kitchens of the friends' mothers and grandmothers. It's nothing like what commercial bakeries trot out.
Readers can't help feeling pained at how leprosy sufferers (of Hansen's disease) in Japan are locked away in sanatoriums under the 1953 leprosy prevention law. The patients were sterilized and subject to poverty wages, and are forbidden all contact with the outside world, stigmatized and neglected, till a segregation law was repealed in 1996. Those who had family and are able to, launched a class action suit in 2016 against the state and government won them freedom. But it was too late for those in their sixties and seventies. Most of the patients left are in their seventies and eighties. They couldn't integrate back and many they knew had passed.
Singapore has our own shame too, at how we treated leprosy sufferers before there was a cure. By July 1897, the Straits Settlements passed the Lepers' Ordinance that empowered authorities to detain leprosy sufferers indefinitely. We had rudimentary buildings for female and male patients in 1900s. Then we have a bigger compound 1929 called the Singapore Leper Asylum, then it was renamed Trafalgar Home; this is in Yio Chu Kang. That segregation lasted till 1976 when the Act was repealed in a newly independent Singapore. Some people today are still old enough to worry that pandemic lockdowns and Covid-19 quarantine camps will become something similar.
The book seeks to humanize illnesses, depression and human afflictions. These aren't things to be ostracized and we shouldn't see someone as 'less human' if they're stricken. In a letter Tokue wrote to Sentaro, she said,
We discovered that once we experienced the joy of being out in the world and free again, the greater the happiness, the more we felt the pain of lost time and lives that could never be returned. Perhaps you understand that feeling. When any of us went outside we always came back exhausted. Not just physical exhaustion, but a deeper exhaustion that comes from bearing a pain that will never go away.
That's why I made confectionery, I made sweet things for all those who lived with the sadness of loss. And that's how i was able to live out my life.
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