Book 3 Ch 1
This story had some interesting twists and subtle changes from previous stories that I liked - carrying the story on from the world building in the prologue, and it shows Beniko taking an active role in getting her customers to directly counter her rival doing the same. Oh yeah, and we see someone having to choose just one sweet - that doesn’t happen often. Normally they go through just definitely wanting precisely one that they see or Beniko shows them.
philosophical thoughts on the one sweet rule
That just one (sweet, visit to Zenitendo) rule is an interesting one that the customers don’t know about but causes some of them problems. Philosophically it feels a bit like either “you can’t rely on getting every wish granted” or in a more real world model “luck/misfortune isn’t something you can choose to make happen”. Maybe that is why there isn’t so much a moral to each sweet (I was surprised she gave a sweet to help the thief, for example), but rather, the idea seems to be that when presented with a lucky / good fortune situation, we aren’t always good judges ourselves of what good fortune is (maybe we didn’t want all the rest that come with what we though we wanted), and whether it continues as good fortune or sours to misfortune is to some extent in our own hands.
I'm not a fan of revenge themes, so that tempered my enthusiasm for this story a bit.
I’m not so sure why it bugs me so much. I think because in fantasy, revenge often escalates quickly to absurdly painful degrees and it’s presented as if we’re meant to empathise with one character in particular. But if people carry that out in real life, revenge just leads to more violence and more suffering for everyone, and I don’t think it’s correct to just empathise with one side, or feel any satisfaction at harm done.
Perhaps put more simply, I don’t like violence as entertainment. It’s a reality for a lot of people and isn’t a topic I want to blunt my emotional responses to. I’ll tolerate it in small less explicit amounts like this book, or if the author explores it in a much more subtle way than just “bad guy gets stuffed, ha!”
This story was a bit more complex and if I remember right, and flows from the Prologue where the father’s colleague had used a sweet from the evil eye shop to give the daughter nightmares. So I might have to look at my copy again to get this right. When you say he, I’m pretty sure do you mean the father getting the sweet for his daughter? (not the colleague) And by warning, warning for what? Like, in general for the sweet the father got from Beniko? I’ll check the guide book for that as it always lists one. Sometimes if the story goes in a positive way, the warning doesn’t get explicitly stated in the story, but it is written in the guidebook.
So if I understand your question correctly, based on the assumptions above, a warning isn’t discussed simply because it didn’t come up (nothing bad happened to the buyer), but there is almost certainly a warning about the side effects of the sweet that I’ll look up.
It’s not that there is no warning/consequences because it was bought for a noble purpose for someone else. The food tree from Book 1 had a warning, for example.
haha, I totally didn’t notice the obi diagram, thanks for pointing that out!! Normally I take them off for reading and don’t really look at them, and when I’m done I put them back on. I used to throw them away until my friend gave me a horrified “whaaaat?? we save those, lol”
