A mochi with sweet bean paste inside, pressed between two leaves of sarutoriibara, greenbrier, and steamed. It is made across Mie in early summer, when the leaves are new and pliable.

The leaves are round, glossy, about the size of a palm. Steaming drives their smell into the mochi, which is the whole reason they are there. Much of Japan wraps this kind of sweet in oak leaf, kashiwa. Here it is greenbrier, and the reason offered is not culinary theory at all. Oak leaves were not easily had in western Japan, so this stood in for them, and it happens to be round and smooth and well suited to holding a piece of dough.

Served, it arrives still wrapped. You lift it by the leaf and peel, and the leaf comes away with a white ghost of the mochi printed on it. Then you eat something extremely plain: rice, sugar, beans.

The plainness is the point at which regional sweets usually get dismissed by visitors, and it is exactly the wrong response. What is different here is not in the mouth. It is in the nose, arriving a half second before the first bite, and it is the smell of a particular hillside in a particular month. Most local confectionery divides along exactly that line. It is eaten at the boys' festival in May and also at nobori, the gathering that marks the end of rice planting, handed round to people who have been bent over in water for a week.