Chestnuts and sugar. That is the entire list of ingredients. Boiled chestnuts are pushed through a sieve, sugar is worked into them, and the paste is twisted up in a cloth so that the folds of the cloth stay printed on the surface. Nothing binds it and nothing is added for texture.

It is not the sticky yellow thing in the new year boxes, which is written with a different character and made largely from sweet potato. The two share a name in speech and very little else. Put them beside each other and the resemblance disappears altogether.

It is made from the first of September until around January, because that is how long the domestic chestnut crop lasts. The ninth day of the ninth month, the old chestnut festival, falls conveniently near the start of that. This part of Gifu grows a good chestnut, and when the season opens there are queues outside the shops in Nakatsugawa on ordinary weekday mornings.

In the middle of the Edo period the inns at Nakatsugawa were handing something like this to travellers on the Nakasendo road. A sweet with a season this short is a strange thing for a highway to become known for. You cannot carry it far, so people came to it instead.