An: A Story About Red Bean Paste and a Life
The Japanese film An as a meditation on living fully within constraints. What the dorayaki vendor and the woman with Hansen's disease teach each other.
An (Dir. Naomi Kawase, 2015)
A middle-aged man runs a small dorayaki shop, making the same sweet bean paste and pancake every day, slowly repaying a debt he never explains. An old woman (Kirin Kike) appears looking for part-time work. He gives it to her. She teaches him to make anko — the sweet red bean paste — by listening to the beans.
Listening to Beans
"Listen to the beans. They have something to say."
This is the film's central instruction and its central metaphor. The old woman spent decades confined to a sanatorium for Hansen's disease — leprosy — at a time when social exclusion was total and legislated. She spent those years, she says, observing: the movement of trees through a wire fence, the passage of seasons in a garden she was never supposed to leave.
She did not stop paying attention. She paid more attention.
When she makes anko, she understands each bean as having come from somewhere, having endured conditions on its way to the pan. The paste she makes from this understanding tastes different from paste made by hands that don't think about it.
What the Film Is About
On the surface, it's about sweet bean paste. Underneath, it's about the conditions under which an ordinary life becomes well-lived.
The old woman has every reason to be bitter. She was taken from society at a young age, forbidden to raise her own child, confined behind a wire fence for decades due to a disease that was already known to be non-contagious during much of her confinement. The injustice was real and is shown clearly.
What she learned in that confinement — to attend to the small things with full attention, to find meaning in the immediate and available — is the film's gift to its audience.
"We were born into this world to see it and be seen by it."
A quiet film. Worth your full attention.