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Pickled! (酔っぱらいブギ, Yopparai bugi?) is the 112th chapter of the Urusei Yatsura manga.

Summary[]

Ataru discovers another oddity of having an alien girlfriend when a humble umeboshi sends her into a drunken rampage!

Plot Overview[]

Whilst hanging around Class 2-4 one day, Ten decides to investigate Ataru's lunch. In particular, he's fascinated by Ataru's umeboshi (pickled plum). When he eats it, however, he starts acting like he's drunk. When the others scold him for giving Ten alcohol, he take Kosuke's umeboshi and gives it to Lum to prove he did no such thing. This immediately goes disastrously wrong as Lum proves to be a mean and erratic drunk; she demands all the umeboshi in class, then goes on a drunken rampage through the school, looking alternatively for more umeboshi and for Ataru, who is doing his best to avoid her.

Characters in Order of Appearance[]

Trivia[]

  • This marks the very last chapter of the manga to be officially translated by Viz Media during their 1990s translation of the series. It wouldn't be until 2019 that Viz Media would purchase the rights to translate the manga into English for a second time, this time completely translating the entire series.
  • Umeboshi (梅干し) are ume fruits that were first dried and then pickled, and are renowned for their intensely sour, salty taste. Ume is a Japanese fruiting tree from the Prunus genus, but though this genus does contain plums and prunes, and ume are often translated as "plums" in English, ume are more closely related to apricots. Ume fruits that are simply pickled without being dried first are known as umezuke (梅漬け). Umeboshi is primarily used as a flavoring ingredient for rice, especially in the form of onigiri and makizushi, as well as a snack on its own, but it also has a position in folk remedies as a cure for colds and flues when included in okayu (rice congee), and as a hangover cure when eaten on its own. It is this last aspect that is the butt of the joke of this chapter, where Lum is completely unaffected by alcohol, but becomes drunk on a traditional remedy for overindulging in alcohol.
  • When Mendō describes Ataru as "unburnable trash", he is referring to the Japanese practice of dividing trash into burnable and unburnable waste before placing it out for collection. As an archipelago with a predominantly mountainous terrain, Japan has a long history of burning or recycling as much garbage as possible, to minimize the space needed for landfills.
  • Shochu (焼酎) is a Japanese distilled liquor that can be created from a wide variety of grains or vegetables, including rice, sweet potatoes, barley, buckwheat, chestnuts, sesame seeds, potatoes and carrots. With an alcohol content of 25% by volume, it is much stronger than the more commonly available rice wine known as sake.
  • This chapter's story may have been inspired by the uptick in high school delinquency that Japan experienced during the 1980s.
  • This chapter was published on December 9, 1981 in Shonen Sunday 1982 Vol. 1-2 - a double-volume released due to the week-long hiatus that Shonen Sunday took from publishing due to the New Year's holidays.
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