![]() The shop starts doing increasingly brisk business, and despite himself, Sentaro gains fresh interest in his work, fiddling with the recipe of his pancake batter and paying keen attention to Tokue’s lessons in confectionery. Sentaro agrees, and nearly comes to regret it with the labor that Tokue draws him into, and yet her bean paste is transcendent in flavor. Then Tokue, an elderly woman with hands disfigured from some disease, turns up and offers to make sweet bean paste for a pittance in pay. He puts as little effort into this as possible, buying his bean paste pre-made from suppliers, and the shop’s clientele is desultory at best. ![]() ![]() Our protagonist is Sentaro, a failure of a man: he is not the writer he once dreamed of becoming, but instead a man with a criminal record and a drinking problem, who spends his days numbly churning out dorayaki, a kind of pancake filled with a sweet bean paste. ![]() It’s an easy read, but not a dumb one–more like where you feel better at the end of it.” Since I read plenty of serious and/or bleak stuff, I’m always grateful for a recommendation like that, but it took me until this fall to really get into it, though it is a quick, gentle read once I had time to dig in. “When you get a moment, I think you’ll like it. ![]() When I was in the early days of my summer of Irish fiction, I visited a couple friends in DC and one of them passed off her copy of this novel to me. ![]()
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