New Year

New Year marks the most intense and sharply bounded season in the grandfather’s rice-cake trade. Villagers buy cakes in the belief that eating one will bring a promotion, turning the holiday into a period of exceptional demand. The season’s brief abundance also frames a recurring test of the grandfather’s generosity: when it ends, the customers disappear, but his concern for the beggar does not.

Seasonal Demand

The grandfather sells rice cakes door to door, and New Year is his busiest time. Because villagers associate eating a cake at New Year with receiving a promotion, he carries an extra basket when he goes to town for the holiday. The custom links a familiar food with hoped-for advancement, giving the cakes a value beyond their use as a meal and concentrating much of the year’s business into a defined season.

One particularly busy New Year, the grandfather sells nearly everything before evening. The only cake he keeps is the one set aside for his mother. As he leaves the village, he has to turn away customers, including the mayor, the richest man in the district, who asks for a cake. The episode makes the demand tangible: even the mayor cannot obtain one once the baskets are empty, and the grandfather will not treat the cake reserved for his mother as ordinary stock.

The Holiday’s Repeated Days

The New Year rush is not confined to a single sale. After the first encounter with the beggar, the grandfather returns the next day with two extra baskets and, remembering the beggar’s promise to appear again, saves two cakes rather than one. When the beggar asks for food, the grandfather gives him a pastry without hesitation. The next day’s preparation therefore carries the previous day forward: the possibility of another meeting changes how the grandfather sets aside his goods.

This pattern continues for fifteen days of New Year. The duration turns the holiday into a repeated routine of selling, saving food, and meeting the beggar, rather than merely a day of unusually high trade. The grandfather’s business remains brisk, but the cakes he withholds for his mother and the beggar show that sales are not his only measure of what the season requires. New Year’s abundance gives him more opportunities to help, while each day’s expectation makes that generosity part of his ordinary practice during the holiday.

The Boundary of the Season

When New Year ends, the market changes at once. Villagers are no longer interested in buying the cakes, and the grandfather trudges home with full baskets of unsold food. The contrast reverses the conditions of the holiday: the same cakes that had sold out quickly now have no customers. The calendar, not a change in the cakes themselves, has closed the period of demand.

The beggar appears again on this walk home. Rather than presenting his remaining cakes as a loss, the grandfather opens his basket and offers food, observing that his own situation is not as bad as the beggar’s. The end of the holiday thus tests the generosity established during its busy days: with no sales to protect and plenty of unsold cakes, he can give more freely. The fifteen-day cycle closes not with a sale but with an act of sharing.

Seasonal Fortune and Lasting Change

The seasonal collapse makes the beggar’s later gift consequential. He gives the grandfather a small jade jar containing silvery-white powder and tells him to sprinkle some into the flour whenever he cooks. After the grandfather follows the instruction, the cakes acquire a delicious aroma, and customers want them again; he once more sells all his cakes, keeping one for his mother and one for the beggar. A fine gentleman then appears in place of the beggar and recognizes that the trouble has been fixed.

The contrast is between demand tied to a particular time and demand revived beyond it. New Year brings customers because of what they expect the holiday cake to secure; once the holiday is over, that expectation no longer draws them. The powder changes the cakes’ appeal and restores their market, while the grandfather’s recurring choice to reserve food preserves the personal obligations that the rush first put under pressure. New Year is therefore both the story’s commercial high point and a measure of how quickly prosperity can pass when its occasion ends.