The Day the Mortars Rang Through the Whole Village at Year's End

Why a village that supped on millet gruel offered white rice cakes to the gods only once a year

Mochi, cakes of pounded steamed rice, was a food that showed its face only on the bright days.

It never came to the everyday table. New Year, celebrations, the seasonal festivals—only on the few gladdening days of the year did it appear, white and glistening, and then vanish again. Nowadays you tear open a bag and have it whenever you like, but at the root of things it was that sort of food, a food for special days.

Why was it special? Trace it back, and it was because the rice itself was special.

In the times I watched, white rice was not yet something everyone could eat their fill of. What the village folk usually put in their mouths, I am told, was more often a gruel of boiled awa and hie—foxtail and barnyard millet. The rice they had labored to grow was taken as tax, offered to the gods; only a scant portion ever reached their own mouths. That precious rice, steamed and pounded and then coaxed through still more toil into shape—that was mochi. And so mochi was never merely food. It was the life of the rice, packed tight and pounded firm, a lump of good fortune, I suppose.

What I watched was the story of just before that white lump slipped from an offering to the gods into a food that marked the turning points of ordinary life.

It was in 1015 (Chōwa 4), when the year had drawn near its close. In a village folded into the hills of Yamato, in the days when I was helping to pound the mochi.

The one who had taken me in was an old woman named Tane. Her back was bent into the shape of a hook, but where mochi was concerned she was the most exacting person in the whole village. From the evening before, Tane had been busy soaking rice she had set aside in a separate jar. A rice that clung well. Not the rice they ate day to day, she said, and she handled it with uncommon care.

"This here is the rice we offer up to Toshigami-sama," she said—Toshigami, the god of the incoming year. "Treat it poorly and the punishment will fall on you."

The rice that had drunk its fill of water through the night was steamed come morning. Steam rose up, and the whole house was wrapped in a sweet smell. Tane pinched up a bit of the steamed rice on her finger and put it in her mouth. It crumbled softly, and yet already it had taken on a stickiness. "Good," she nodded, and now, at last, the mortar had its turn.

The steaming rice was carried to the stone mortar set in the yard. The men took up the pestle in turns. At first it was less pounding than crushing—bearing down with the whole weight of the body, again and again, to work the grains flat. Bungle this, they said, and the grains would stay whole and the food would sit ill on the tongue. Before everyone's watching eyes, the young men worked away with sweat standing on their brows.

Once it was worked enough, the pounding proper could begin.

Petan, petan—the pestle struck the mochi. In the space while the pounder raised the pestle, Tane would dart her wetted hand into the mortar and flip the mass over. That interweaving of hands took the breath from those of us watching. The pestle falls; a hair's breadth before it, the hand slips away. Let the timing shift by a single breath, and Tane's hand would be crushed. But the old woman's hand, by the sense of long years, was always a shade faster than the pestle.

The petan grew, little by little, heavier and stickier. In the mortar there was no longer any trace of a grain. It had become one smooth white mass of mochi.

Catching that sound, the neighbors came drifting in, one after another. The sound of year's-end mochi-pounding was a kind of signal to the whole village that another year was ending. In the next house, and the one beyond it, the mortars rang, petan, petan. The sounds from here and there overlapped until the whole village seemed to be beating like one great heart. The children waited in a corner of the yard, fidgeting, wondering when they might eat.

The pounding at Tane's house, too, was drawing near its end. The last mortarful was special. It would be the most important mochi of all, the one offered up to Toshigami-sama. Tane pressed the young man at the pestle especially hard: pound with your whole heart, do not let your eyes wander. Even the fire in the hearth where the rice was steamed she did not let die for a single moment from morning on. If the fire went out, some impurity would pass into the mochi offered to the god—so she seemed to believe. Such care that you wondered why she went so far. And yet not one of the villagers thought it a strange thing. The most precious rice of the year, pounded with the greatest care. They wore the faces of people simply doing the obvious thing, the obvious way.

That year, I heard, the water had run short in summer, and the village had suffered greatly for it. The fields yielded thin, and the autumn stores were meager. Even so, Tane never let the mochi lapse.

"It's the hard years above all that you've got to make the offering."

Skimp on the rice, thin out the offering to the god, and the coming year would be leaner still. But offer up a white mochi as full as you could manage even in hardship, and Toshigami-sama would surely look kindly on you, thinking, this year at least—so the old folk of the village all believed alike. It was not that they offered because they were rich. It was that because they offered, they could go on living another year. The order of it was the reverse of what I had thought. To break into their scant stores and still set a white mochi before the god—that spirit gave the lean village a small, quiet lift at year's end.

The pounded mochi Tane took onto a board and swiftly rounded. First two large flat circles. Stack the larger and the smaller, she said, and set them on the god-shelf.

"Why do you make them round?" I tried asking.

Tane said it as though it were nothing. It's the shape of a mirror. At the year's beginning Toshigami-sama comes down to each house and takes up his dwelling in this round mochi. So you make it round in the likeness of a mirror. If there were any sharp place, the god would find his lodging uncomfortable—so, just as she had been taught by her own grandmother, Tane stroked and rounded the mochi. It was not a matter of reason. It had been handed down so, and so she did it. Only that, and her hands moved without a trace of doubt.

The rest of the mochi was pinched off and rounded small, dusted with roasted soybean flour or boiled red beans, and passed around to everyone there.

The children reached out, each racing to be first. Fresh-pounded mochi stretched soft in the mouth, faintly sweet. These were children who supped their days on millet gruel. At the sweetness of the white mochi, every one of them went round-eyed.

Among Tane's grandchildren was a little one of perhaps four years. It was the first mochi of his life, and, astounded at how far the mochi stretched, he had smeared the soybean flour all around his mouth. Tane wiped his cheek and narrowed her eyes with a smile.

"Eat this, and you take on another year. Be hale next year too, and get to eat it again—that'd be fine."

The child paid no mind to what the old woman said. He only wrestled with the stretching mochi, shrieking and laughing.

To take on a year—so the people of that land spoke of it. When the year turned over, this mochi would be put into a broth and eaten. Eat the mochi, and so much the more strength would come to you, and you could take on one more year. The white mochi was not a thing that was merely sweet. It was also a lump of strength, for living out a new year.

When the passing-round was done, Tane wrapped several of the small rounded mochi in a cloth of hemp and pressed them into my hand.

"You take these along too. Good to eat when you need strength on the road."

The mochi I received was still faintly warm. Into my palm the weight of the rice's life came down, heavy. How much toil it took to make even this much. Rice soaked from the evening before, steamed at daybreak, worked and pounded in a sweat, the old woman slipping in her hand at the risk of her life—all of it was packed into this small lump. It ought to have been heavy. And yet, strangely, that weight was different from the weight of a load that bites into the shoulder. It was the kind of weight that made the palm grow slowly, gently warm.

That evening, the village folk put the mochi into their bellies and went home, each to their own house. From tomorrow it would be back to a life of millet gruel. But today, this one day, everyone had eaten white mochi, offered it to the god, and laughed. A year of toil, closed off with a single white day.

As the sun went down, Tane set the largest kagami-mochi—the round "mirror rice cakes"—reverently upon the god-shelf. She arranged a small leafed sprig atop it, brushed away every last speck of dust, and adjusted the mochi's seating again and again. She worked at it until it satisfied her, and then she pressed together her wrinkled hands. What she was praying for, she did not say. She only kept her eyes closed a long, long while.

That four-year-old, too, stood beside the old woman, joining his small hands in imitation of her. He could not have understood what it meant. Even so, because his grandmother did it, he did it too. In that way, the gesture of offering the round mochi and joining the hands would pass into the child's body ahead of any words, I suppose.

At a year's end the god is welcomed, and a new year begins quietly to come round again. At that great turning point, a white mochi sat, small and alone. In the darkening board-floored room, it alone seemed to float, faintly white.

When that kagami-mochi first became the fixed custom of New Year, even I cannot say for certain.

Only, watching the life that came after, mochi came more and more to show its face here and there throughout the year. The kagami-mochi of New Year, the diamond-shaped mochi of the Doll Festival, the wrapped rice cakes of the Boys' Festival, the mochi of autumn. At every seasonal turn a white mochi was set out, and people came to count the seasons by them as their markers. The mochi of that single night, when rice was pounded and offered to the god, became at some point a food that marks out the very calendar of ordinary life.

Now, when the end of the year comes, kagami-mochi line the shelves of the shops. The mochi inside is cut small and put in bags, and only the outer shell is round and glistening. The sound of the mortar, the smell of the steam, the wet hand of Tane—none of it is anywhere anymore.

And even so, I think.

When someone eats mochi at New Year and, even a little, joins their hands with a "this year too, I ask your favor," it runs in a straight line back to that village old woman and the mochi she stroked into a perfect round. May it be a round year, with no sharp places. May Toshigami-sama pass it in comfort. That shape of a wish—I am rather fond of it, I find.

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