Kudzu starch from Yoshino is slaked in water, sugared, and worked over the heat until it turns clear. Then it is poured into a mould, chilled, and served with black syrup and roasted soybean flour.

It is transparent. Light goes through it on the plate. There is a confection in the Kanto region with the same name in speech, but that one is made from wheat starch fermented with lactic bacteria, and it is cloudy and white. Different characters, different plant, different process. The two share a sound and nothing else.

The starch comes from the root of a mountain vine, one that grows across half the country as a weed. You dig it up, crush it, wash it repeatedly in cold water, let the starch settle out and dry whatever sinks to the bottom. The yield is very small for the amount of work involved, which is why the real thing has always been expensive and why a good deal of what is sold under the name is cut with potato starch.

It is cold and it tastes of almost nothing. The syrup is what makes it a sweet at all. Being clear and being flavourless are not defects here; they are the whole proposition, and they are also the reason it belongs to summer rather than to any other season.