Glutinous rice is wrapped in kumazasa bamboo leaves and tied with rush. A little baking soda goes into boiling water, the parcels boil for about thirty minutes, and then they are dropped into cold water. You untie the leaf and eat the rice with kinako sweetened with sugar.

Bamboo leaf is credited with antibacterial and preservative properties, and it has long been what things were wrapped in when they had to keep or to travel any distance. The wrapper here is doing work, not decoration.

The occasions are the fifth-month festival and sanaburi, the celebration that marks the end of the rice planting, and the second of those is the one that explains everything about the dish.

That second one explains the dish. In Akita, once the planting was finished, a daughter who had married out went back to her own family for a rest, and the custom had a name, sanaburi-yasumi. What she carried with her when she went, and what she carried when she returned to her husband's house, was this. The wrapping and the shape differ from district to district, some triangular, some long and narrow. That is what happens to a food whose whole purpose is to be carried between two houses, in both directions, by someone who is going home.