The Lucky Bean

At a meal with a large group the other day, we had a dessert that was a kind of white Jell-O with some kind of beans in it. One of the men said he thought he got an azuki, a sweet red bean, in his dessert. They started teasing him, because everyone else was pretty sure they had kuromame, black soybeans, in the dessert. Someone dug out one of the beans and showed it to him, insisting that it was a black soybean.

He was starting to look a little bit irritated when I joined the discussion.

I said, "Maybe he got the lucky azuki."

Everyone turned to look at me and said, "What do you mean?"

"Well, I heard that in some places, when they make dessert, they put one red bean in with all the black beans." I said.

They glanced at each other. "Why would they do that?"

"Supposedly, the person who gets the red bean is lucky. So it's important to figure out who got the red bean."

There was a little laughter, and the man who had been the target of the teasing said, "I don't think that's what happened. That's just a story."

But he had a smile now.