Review: The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai
A novel about the quest for food and love set in a Kyoto diner that not only serves delicious meals but also helps customers locate long forgotten dishes
In Jesse Kirkwood’s translation of The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, readers are let into a series of quests for food and love set in a quiet backstreet of Kyoto.
The father-daughter duo, Nagare and Koishi, run a diner and a food detective agency where they not only serve delicious meals but also help customers locate dishes they have long forgotten. They have no signboard because Nagare believes that whoever is destined to be at the diner will find their way there. Their one-line magazine advert has no contact details so demands can be met. The place also has a cat, a red tabby who goes by the name Drowsy – he’s always sleeping and walking drowsily around the customers.
Over six chapters, six different customers visit the Kamogawa diner with their specific dish requests. The atmosphere and the plot structure is evocative of the cosy-yet-expectant air of the 2014 Netflix series Midnight Diner. Both stories feature a chef who creates dishes for different customers and show aspects of individual life through food. What makes Kamogawa Diner stand out is the mystery that sustains it as Nagare and Koishi discover dishes they hadn’t thought they could recreate.
The Kamogawa Food Detectives pays great attention to the setting through the seasons, the crowd, and to city infrastructure. Much like Florentyna Leow’s 2023 travel memoir, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, this novel, first published in Japanese in 2013, is an ode to Kyoto. The chapters begin with each customer’s description of the city: “Its leaves were all a golden hue…There was nowhere like Kyoto to make you really notice the changing of the seasons — something that completely escaped him… in Tokyo.” While Leow’s moving memoir captures the beauty and heartbreak the city can cause, Kashiwai’s rendering of Kyoto as a city in motion from “its bitter winter” to “colours of spring” makes the reader feel each customer’s closeness or distance to the place.
But more than anything, it is food that drives the story forward. Hideji, the customer from the opening chapter wishes to have his late wife’s nabeyaki-udon which his current partner fails to make. Nagare says, “Things can taste very different depending on how you’re feeling,” because food acquires the meaning we give to it. In another chapter, Asuka, a nineteen-year old girl, cries at the taste of the spaghetti that Nagare prepares for her. Here, the novel reaches its highest point to characterise food as growth. Asuka’s childhood memories of spaghetti with her grandfather make it more than just a dish she had on her way home.
The rich descriptions of the multitude of dishes within Japanese cuisine make the reader pause, mull over it all, and then want to know what’s coming next. From the “miso-glazed butterburs with millet cake” to the mackerel sushi “arranged on a long, narrow Koimari-ware dish” and the “spice of nostalgia” evoked by the beef stew, food here is a central character. And like the reaction of the customers, it can make the reader cry. Nagare’s wall of photograph of food piques customers’ curiosity and makes conversation among them easier. At the individual level, it is food that makes them distinct to one another. These distinctions not only exist at the level of preferences but also in the ways in which food affects them.
Hisahiko’s rags-to-riches story has a bearing on how he prefers his food. Though he is a success in Tokyo’s corporate world, he had a lonesome childhood after his mother’s death. His taste for nikujaga is steeped in past memories and in misunderstandings that he has not had the time to unravel. Suyako’s fond memory of the tonkatsu she had at her ailing ex-husband’s restaurant is covered in layers of tears. She is eager to make him taste it and yet wonders if it would ever be possible.
Kashiwai’s writing soars with sensitivity and love. The style is simple. There are ample descriptions to prepare the reader, and then the whole tasting-interviewing-final results of the detective work by Koishi and Nagare is played out through dialogues. These dialogues work stylistically to keep the reader engaged enough to begin reading aloud. They are structured in a way that makes each of the scene’s characters stand out. When Nagare is the senior voice issuing wisdom and commands, his daughter Koishi is the witty, active listener who is ready with inputs when her father stumbles. If a Tokyoite can be an arrogant, self-involved voice, there is a local from Kyoto who is heartbroken and listless with just a touch of Kyoto’s somnolent beauty.
Though food is the central theme, the novel, much like Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles (2012), is a story about friendship, loss, death, and memories. We are often reminded of death through Nagare’s insistent reference to his late wife Kikuko. She defines the diner while being absent as a living character. She holds the place as a scared memory, as a companion to Nagare, a mother to Koishi when she needs to complain about life, and a curiosity for customers who learn where the love for food in the Kamogawa diner really comes from. The cat Nana’s story, and the human Saturo’s story of travelling across Japan meeting people and finding kindness in different forms in Arikawa’s novel finds an indulgent echo in this book.
The experimental nature of The Kamogawa Food Detectives keeps readers glued to the page. The pattern might occasionally feel repetitive but that does not interfere with the pleasure it provides. In sum, it is difficult to finish reading this novel and feel unchanged.
Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata.