Sweet Bean Paste

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.’

All experience adds up to a life lived as only you could

But what about a child whose life is over before he or she even turns two years old? People may wonder, in their sorrow, what point there is in a child like that even being born.

I have learned the answer to this. I am sure it is for that child to perceive wind, sky, and voices in his or her own unique way. The world that child senses exists because of it, and therefore that child’s life, too, has purpose and meaning.

We have the ability to open up our ears and minds to anything and everything.

All the time he had ever squandered in his life seemed to be clinging to his footsteps, dragging him down. He felt as if he were a scrap of rubbish, drifting through one backstreet alley after another.

He had not chosen to do this work because he wanted to; he wanted to be free of it as soon as possible. That’s all he was aiming for.

‘But sales haven’t improved. If people are going to say good things they could at least buy more,’ Sentaro complained.

‘We should simply be grateful they come at all.’

‘But you don’t get bean paste like this so easily.’

‘Yes, but the world isn’t an easy place…’

Looking at the address, Sentaro saw she had written the name of a district that was on the outskirts of the city. He had an odd feeling it should mean something to him, but couldn’t say why.

Memories of his mother…She was softly spoken but troubled by anxieties beneath the surface that she could not conceal. Then there were the loud disputes with his father, and arguments with relatives that made her cry and scream. As a child Sentaro had been frightened by these outbursts, that’s why he’d wished there could always be cake on the table.

You never knew what the future held, he mused. Look at the path he’d ended up on, instead of becoming a writer as he hoped. And how he had passed the days these last few years, standing in front of a griddle cooking dorayaki. Never once had he imagined himself doing that.