In Tottori the word oyagani, parent crab, means the female snow crab. The male gets called matsubagani and carries a price to match. The female is smaller and holds two kinds of roe: uchiko packed orange under the shell, sotoko clustered beneath her belly. Add the crab miso and there is a great deal of flavor in a small animal.

Because of that, the soup is kept deliberately bare. Cooks add as little as possible so nothing competes. The crab goes into cold water and comes up slowly, which draws the stock out rather than sealing it in, and a few pieces of daikon simmering alongside absorb everything the shell gives up. The daikon is often the part people mention first.

The season opens on the sixth of November and closes at the end of December. Seven or eight weeks, and then nothing until the following autumn. What surprised me is that a dish this narrowly timed is not treated as a luxury. The crabs turn up cheaply in ordinary supermarkets around Tottori city, and the soup gets made on weeknights.

There is a reason the window is that short, of course. These are the females carrying eggs, and the fishery closes before the season can eat into next year. Scarcity here is a rule someone wrote down. The soup tastes like winter partly because it is only allowed to.