I’ll have a snack, too… I’m hungry.
*goso goso* I rummage through my pack and produce the box of snacks, a properly wrapped gift package.
I’d actually planned to hand them out to the neighbors here, but by the looks of things, there are no people or houses for miles around.
Were my ancestors that eccentric, or what? ——well, setting that aside…
Ufufu, in that case I’ll have you settle my stomach like a good bunch of 13-koku manjuu. (TN: A manjuu is a steamed bun with some kind of filling. Koku is explained below.)
13-koku manjuu—— This is a famous confection from where I live. Legend has it that a post-retirement traveling crepe salesman bought one with thirteen koku.
When using unfamiliar units and a real-seeming enough number like thirteen, it might be easy to fool someone, but one koku is ten to, ten to is a hundred shou, and a hundred shou is a thousand gou, so thirteen koku would be thirteen thousand gou. (TN: These are old Japanese volume units. The text doesn’t explain what the thirteen koku would be of, but I would guess sake or rice. As a frame of reference, a shou is 1.8 liters, probably the size of those bulbous ceramic sake containers you see in samurai films or anime set in old Japan, so thirteen koku would be thirteen hundred of those.)
As for gou, that’s a unit used commonly when cooking rice at home, so when you think about it, thirteen thousand gou is amazing.
By the way, according to my classmate, O-Rin-san, she can eat 3250 bowls of nihachi soba. (TN: Soba is buckwheat noodles, in this case dropped in a soup bowl much like ramen. The nihachi variety is a traditional dish that probably gets its name from a joke, called “toki soba,” where a boy cons a vendor into accepting one coin less than the price.)
If she’s okay having nothing but soba for three meals a day, if you do the math, it would mean she’s been eating out every meal for nearly three years.
……There has to be some embellishment, there.
But, I like it, so that’s okay.