Little Forest: Winter/Spring (リトル・フォレスト　冬・春)

"Little Forest" is divided into 4 parts - Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring. After the end credits of "Winter", "Spring" follows. Please enjoy the continuity of the movies.

You've got mail!

Coming!

Good morning.

It sure's chilly.

Yeah, it's getting cold.

I heard that it'll snow sometime at noon.

Oh.

It's all bills again?

There's one letter there.

Oh.

See you then.

A letter from Mom came during autumn.

Komori (Little Forest) is a small settlement in a village somewhere in the Tohoku region.

There aren't any stores here,

but if you have a little shopping to do, there's a small farmer's co-op supermarket

and some other stores in the the village center, where the town hall is.

The way there is mostly downhill, so that takes about 30 minutes,

but I'm not too sure how long the trip back takes.

During winter, you have to go on foot because of the snow,

so that'll take you something like a good hour and a half.

But it seems that most people

do their shopping at places like the big suburban supermarket in a neighboring city.

When I decide to go there, it nearly ends up taking the whole day.

Oopsie.

Today is Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas, because my mother makes a fuss over details,

so we never celebrated it once.

Mommy, let's celebrate Christmas!

We are not Christians so what for?

How selfish!

Selfish! Selfish! Selfish!

But nevertheless, when I was small,

we would always have guests around this season.

And she would make cake.

Coming!

Hi.

Hello.

Come in.

Why, hello there!

Where are your manners?

He used to take care of me a long time ago.

Hello.

He was a foreigner.

Now that I think about it, he might have been my mother's old lover.

Though I don't have any basis.

You're really good at drawing.

What's this suppose to be?

Green peas!

Here's the cake!

My mother's Christmas cake was a rectangular loaf, white with fresh cream on the outside.

Once she cut it with the knife, the slice would reveal the brilliant red and green Christmas colors.

It's very pretty. How did you make it?

How do you make it? It's amazing!

Want to know?

The red is amazake made from red rice.

The green is spinach.

I put the two types of dough into one mold and baked them.

But I don't understand how it ends up as two colors lengthwise. If you just put in the dough like that, it's impossible.

You'll have to figure that one out by yourself.

You okay?

There was one left.

That man came to our house around three times,

but that was it.

I see.

And that also marked the end of that Christmas cake.

I've had it before.

What?

Back in middle school.

I don't remember.

I think it was around a year before Ma'am Fukuko left.

She had me sample the taste.

I didn't know that.

I used to borrow books from her all the time. You used to have a whole bunch of them, right?

Like collections of complete works and encyclopedias.

Oh yeah, you did come over all the time.

Well, she praised you a lot.

Even though I'm not particularly fond of books, I began to try to read them anyways.

That's when she suddenly said to me...

Go and find your own books to read if you're going to read for yourself.

What?

Or something like that. She then sold them to the second-hand book store.

We probably didn't have money left.

I helped carry the books so she gave me a couple of them.

I see. The fact that she made a cake may have meant that she had a man around then too.

So, what about the cake?

Oh yeah. We haven't grown red rice for the longest time, right?

Though the ears of the red rice plants are red and make the fields look pretty,

the seeds actually spill out easily and it's a pain to harvest.

That's when I thought that I could just use black rice.

We grow black rice every year.

So I made amazake with black rice.

I used slightly less water and it ended up fairly strong.

Black rice is of the glutinous variety, so it comes out quite sweet.

The amazake was completely black,

but when mixed with sugar, baking soda, wheat flour,

baking soda and oil into a doughly mixture, it ended up a purple color that was just right.

Yellow goes well with purple, so I made yellow colored dough out of boild pumpkin as well.

I filled the mold with the dough made out fo the black rice, up to a little less than half.

Then on top of that, I poured the pumpkin dough till the entire thing was about eight tenths of the mold's height.

Then, I baked it in the oven.

After baking, I immediately put the side that was bulging out on the bottom and cooled it down.

Doing that would level out the sides.

And by doing so, you get the colors of the dough to be lengthwise.

Then I decorate it with fresh cream.

Merry Christmas!

I see.

- Sorry, I'm late! - Hey!

Let's get started with the Christmas tea party!

- No. This is a tea party for the year's end. - Huh?

This is a three color cake made of purple, yellow and white. Those are not Christmas colors.

Besides, you guys aren't Christians either, right?

Why are you being so fussy?

Come on. Let's just eat.

Well then. For the coming year...

Let's hope for the best.

- Let's eat! - Digging in!

Oh! It's delicious.

- It's good! - Delicious.

- Pumpkins? - Yup.

Hello!

I'm here for the neighborhood notice.

Ah! Ichiko! Thanks for coming all the way.

What are you drawing?

Mushrooms.

I've made some manjuu. Have some.

Thank you.

What's your favourite meal, Ichiko?

When I was asked this...

The first thing that popped into my head was natto mochi made with freshly pounded mochi.

Mixing the natto with sugar,

you take some piping hot mochi and tear pieces off into natto.

We had a mochi making day at my school.

It was 16 years ago.

All the moms were running back and forth all over the place.

We worked on digging up the natto.

We buried them under the snow.

Wow! It's done!

It takes three days to make natto.

You wrap soy beans that have been boiled soft in "warazuto" (cylindrical container weaved from straw).

If you stick a piece of straw inside at this stage, you'll get a lot of strings.

Wrap it in a straw mat,

dig a hole in the snow.

Then on the top of a straw blanket,

comes a snow blanket.

There are all sorts of things buried under the snow.

Cabbage. Green onion. Spinach.

Daikon and carrots are in holes in the ground.

They are wrapped in cedar leaves to keep the mice away.

When vegetables face low temperatures, they get injured and go bad.

So it's best to preserve them using a blanket of snow.

It stabilizes the temperature if you bury them.

You also use that when making natto.

We pray it would turn out tasty.

We pray it would turn out tasty.

You gotta flip it over right,

or you don't get good tasting mochi.

It's heavy. Can you carry it?

Go on and carry it!

Go, go, go.

Whoopsie!

Okay, stir it up for me.

Be sure to not stick the mochi.

Okay, see how it tastes.

Really?

It tastes good when it's nice and warm.

Here. Go on.

Freshly made, still warm,

and very soft mochi.

Natto chock-full of sugar and soy sauce.

I pop them into my mouth one after another.

I want to keep eating them forever and ever.

It was the first natto mochi with sugar and soy sauce that I ever ate.

It's important to knead it before pounding.

Before my mom started living in Komori, I had never eaten natto mochi.

So there wasn't really a particular flavour I could call our "family recipe".

- I want to do it by myself. - Are you sure?

But since then...

Don't hit me.

freshly-pounded natto mochi with lots of sugar and soy sauce became our recipe.

The bacteria that makes natto is on the rice straw.

So rice cultivation is itself ""natto mochi" cultivation.

It's ten minutes by bike to get to the paddy field we're renting.

This year we had rain and lower temperatures.

I used to worry and go out to the plants everyday.

Rice plants grow from the sound of people's footsteps.

The whole village sure was frantic during the threshing, working during lulls in the cold rain.

And the product of this year's mochi-rice cultivation is..

this...

this...

this!

Time to eat.

The local school has already closed down. Sometimes, it's used by the people in the village.

Snow is falling on Komori.

I have to maintain the path leading away from the roads the snowplows clear.

You've got mail!

Coming!

- Good morning. - Here.

Oh, you've made some frozen daikon.

- Yup. It's just like you said. - I see.