Milk

When I was a child, I tried to pour milk into a glass during a meal, but my hand slipped and I dropped the carton. I wiped up the milk that had covered the table in a fit of half-anger, but the milk had mixed into the miso soup that happened to be sitting right in front of me, turning it a mellow color.
It seemed a waste to throw it away, so I drank it as it was, and I felt like it was somehow delicious.
When I told my mother that, she informed me, "Grandma drinks her miso soup like that."
I thought my grandmother did such strange things, so the next time I saw her, I watched her closely, but she didn't do anything of the sort. She was drinking her miso soup normally as miso soup.
I thought it might have been a lapse in my mother's memory, but I didn't confirm it. Even if I asked now, she probably wouldn't remember.

Another time, when I went to my grandmother's house, my cousins from Tokyo were there, and both of them were drinking something that looked like milk from glass cups while saying "mugyu-mugyu." I didn't understand what it meant at all. Thinking that this is why Tokyoites are troublesome, I asked them what they were drinking, and they said it was "mugyu."
"Mugyu?"
"It's putting milk in barley tea."
"My big sister ran home from school and said, 'I thought of mugyu!'"
The younger sister gave me information I hadn't particularly asked for. I thought there was no need to run home just for the sake of mugyu.
I watched the two of them drink it for a while, but it didn't look delicious to me at all.
More than that, I wondered what kind of mindset they had to come up with such a thing, and even if they did come up with it, why they would want to try it out in practice; the more I thought about it, the stranger those sisters were.
Then my aunt, with a look of resignation, asked me, "Do you want to try some?" I replied, "No thanks."