Over Hakone, Yaji and Kitahachi traveled on through Mishima, Numazu, Hara and Yoshiwara, gazing at Mount Fuji. After Fuchu, Yaji's hometown (today's Shizuoka city), the next post town was Mariko.
The Mariko post town was known for its yam soup: wild yam grated and thinned with miso soup, poured over barley rice. Basho too wrote: "ume wakana / Mariko no shuku no / tororojiru" (Plum blossoms, young greens, and at the Mariko post town, yam soup).
Hungry, the two went into a yam soup shop. But inside, a husband and wife were in the middle of a quarrel. The husband was grating yam in a mortar for the soup, and his wife, with a baby on her back, kept butting in. When the husband lost his temper and raised the pestle, "Shut your mouth, woman!", the wife gave as good as she got: "What's that, you good-for-nothing!"
The couple came to blows, the mortar overturned, and yam soup was splattered all over the floor. The husband slipped on the yam and went head over heels, and the neighbor's wife who came to stop them fell down too, covered in yam.
Yaji and Kitahachi left the shop dumbfounded, without eating any yam soup. Yaji composed a verse:
"kenka suru / fufu wa kuchi o / togarashite / tonbi tororo ni / suberi koso sure" (The quarreling couple purse their lips like kites, and slip on the yam soup; a pun on the kite's cry, "pi-hyororo," and tororo, yam)
In Mariko, Chojiya, a yam soup shop said to have been founded in 1596, is still in business; its storefront even appears in Utagawa Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido. Statues of Yaji and Kita stand in front of the thatched shop.