Individual osechi dishes are chosen and arranged largely for the puns and visual associations their names or appearance carry in Japanese, a style of symbolic food shared with several other Japanese New Year customs. Kuromame, sweetened black soybeans, plays on a word for diligence and health, and eating them is a wish for a year of hard, honest work carried out in good health. Kazunoko, herring roe, is prized for its sheer number of tiny eggs and stands directly for fertility and the wish for many descendants. Kobumaki, kelp rolled and tied, plays on a word close to the Japanese for joy or celebration.
Ebi, shrimp, cooked so its body curves, is read as an old person bent with age, standing for long life. Kuri kinton, a sweet paste of chestnut and sweet potato, is colored and named to suggest gold, standing for wealth in the year ahead. Each dish is selected and placed in its box less for how the individual foods combine as a meal in the ordinary sense than for how the full set of wishes reads together once the boxes are opened, a display of hopes for the year translated into food that guests and family eat through over the first days of January, while the more devotional understanding of Toshigami's visit sits quietly behind the custom for those households that still hold it.