As planned the annual New Year’s party was conducted at the Sedlaceks’ home today.
Mochi is a culinary curiosity that doesn’t have, as near as I can tell, a suitable parallel in Western cuisine. Thus most Westerners end up with varying opinions of it. I personally love the stuff, especially when it’s paired with the red bean paste that is so common in traditional Japanese sweets. Mochi is a year-round thing, but it’s particularly prevalent at this time of year. Today we had ozenzai, which is a simple soup made from the aforementioned red beans and served with a small cut (chunk? piece?) of mochi. The soup today was sweetened beyond what I’m used to, but other than that it was very good.
Afterwards the crowd of 20 or 30 split up to play games. The must-play game at New Year’s parties is hyakuninisshu, in which 100 cards containing the second halves of 100 famous poems are laid out on the floor. Each poem is recited once, and the object is to be the first to take the matching card. (These days you can get a CD that has someone reciting each poem in a very lyrical, Japanese fashion while faint koto music plays in the background.) Kids apparently memorize these poems as part of their elementary school education, which can give one an edge by recognizing the beginning and thus getting a head start on looking for the end.
I managed to take 8, which was 7 above my “safe” goal of 1. Although the poems are all written in hiragana (so anyone can read them), the difficulty is compounded by the fact that they’re all written in an old style. Diacritics, of which there are two types in modern Japanese, were absent. Other times the pronunciation of certain characters or groups of characters just didn’t match with the expected reading in modern Japanese. I think it was kefu that was written on two or three cards, but the correct pronunciation (and the way it is rendered today) is kyou. It’s still a fun game, though, especially when multiple people all go for the same card.