Sweet Bean Paste
Author : Durian Sukegawa, Alison Watts (Translator)
This was a beautiful story. I picked up this book on a lazy Saturday morning expecting a wholesome read. Although my initial assumption wasn’t wrong, there’s so much more to this book than what I thought there was.
With hardly 200 pages, this is a story revolving around its two main characters who happen to be very different from each other. One of the first things that stood out as I read this book was how simple it was. Everything from the writing style to the explanation of personal philosophies and scene descriptions were made beautifully straightforward without any elaboration.
The story was very heartwarming and really makes you think how the worth of a person in a society is measured. Although it never gets very philosophical, all the characters in this story gives an insight into how different people deal with limitations in life.
This book reminded me a lot of ‘A Man Called Ove’ by Fredrik Backman which was another novel I really enjoyed. Although the plot of both these books are very different, they’re similar in the way it ties an emotional anchor around a central character and uses their progress to drive the story.
