Published by Mantle
Publication date - 5 October 2023
Source - review copy
What's the one dish you'd do anything to taste just one more time?
Down a quiet backstreet in Kyoto exists a very special restaurant. Run by Koishi Kamogawa and her father Nagare, the Kamogawa Diner treats its customers to wonderfully extravagant meals. But that's not the main reason to stop by . . .
The father-daughter duo have started advertising their services as 'food detectives'. Through ingenious investigations, they are capable of recreating a dish from their customers' pasts – dishes that may well hold the keys to unlocking forgotten memories and future happiness.
From the widower looking for a specific noodle dish that his wife used to cook, to a first love's beef stew, the restaurant of lost recipes provides a link to the past – and a way to a more contented future.
Koishi and her father Nagare run the Kamogawa Diner. Hidden down a quiet street, with no sign outside, patrons come to eat whatever is on the menu. On their first visit they are given what Nagare deems suitable. Then, often, they follow Koishi to her office and engage the pair of food detectives. Clients are looking for a dish from their past and hope that Nagare can re-create the magic of the memory left by it.
There is of course a link to food and memories. Favourite childhood meals. Treats specific to a time or place, to a grandparent or a meal eaten when you fell in love. Taste reactivates memories, allows us to time travel back to that time in that kitchen, around that table with those people. It has a way of connecting us to others, to other places and to a time when we may have been different ourselves.
Nagare doesn't always re-create the food as memory serves. He sometimes prepares the food the customer needs, rather than requests. With each serving he explains his deductive process, finding out things from the customer's past that they weren't aware off, shifting their perspectives in the process.
Through each customer the pair also remember more about their own past, reflecting on Nagare's wife, Koishi's mother who died years earlier.
A sign for me of a good translation is forgetting that the book is translated. That is the case here. The words flow and I didn't once stop to wonder if what was written would actually have been said in Japan.
As I always find with translated fiction, and particularly Japanese fiction, there is a magical, otherworldly essence to the book. The deductions former police officer Nagare makes are practical, there is no slight of hand involved. And yet each customer's story has that sparkling quality that makes it feel both wonderfully unreal and yet completely real at the same time.
A lovely, reflective story about the power of food and the memories it can restore.
You can buy a copy of the book here.
(This is an affiliate link. You can also purchase The Kamogawa Food Detectives from your local independent bookshop.)
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