Mugwort, soaked and worked thoroughly into the dough. Sweet bean paste inside. Three bamboo leaves wrapped around the outside, tied with sedge or rush, then twenty minutes in the steamer.

The leaves are not decoration. Bamboo grass is antibacterial and slows spoilage, which turned a sweet into something that would keep, and that is why it exists in the form it does. It is eaten across the Kaetsu area of Niigata, up into Chuetsu, and in parts of the Aizu region of Fukushima.

Two origin stories run alongside each other. One is that Uesugi Kenshin carried them as field rations, which is the story that gets repeated because it involves a warlord. The other is that they came from a way of using kuzumai, the broken and chipped rice that could not be handed over as tax.

I read the second one after the first, and the object changed slightly in my hands. A general's provisions and a farmer's method for eating the rice nobody would accept are not the same thing at all. At the boys' festival in May, households made large batches of them using rice flour, which suggests fairly clearly which of the two versions is closer to how these were actually lived with.