The Kamogawa Food Detectives–Restaurateur re-creates meals from your past

Review by C.J. Bunce

Maybe it’s the blend of seasonings in the Italian sauce at the long-closed Bamie’s Pizza. Maybe it’s the secret ingredients of the tzatziki sauce your late friend Alan used for his gyros. Maybe it’s what created the flavors in your mom’s Thanksgiving stuffing. Maybe it’s the flavor of the baked potatoes you ate as a kid at the steak house run by that Greek couple. Or maybe it’s echoing the flavor of those loose meat sandwiches at the Canteen alley restaurant. In an unmarked backstreet building in Kyoto, Japan, retired cop and widower Nagare Kamogawa and his 30-year-old daughter Koishi don’t get much business. They only advertise via a single, cryptic line in the ad column of a gourmet magazine, with no actual contact information. What they offer is the re-creation of a memory via a dish from your past. Five customers are the subject of the Hisashi Kashiwai’s 2013 Japanese novel The Kamogawa Food Detectives, which sees its first English translation this month by Jesse Kirkwood for Random House/G.P. Putnam’s Sons. It’s available now here at Amazon, with the new translation of its sequel, The Restaurant of Lost Recipes available for pre-order now here.

What meal would you like from your past that no longer exists?

Despite the “detectives” in the title, don’t expect this to be a mystery. It also has no fantasy elements. The Kamogawa Food Detectives is a quaint, short, palm-sized story of two people using their skills to help strangers connect with themselves. It’s filled with Japanese cuisine and nostalgic journeys through small-town and big city Japan. Each chapter follows the same formula, which makes the narrative exactly like watching an episode of a Hallmark TV drama. First the stranger finds his or her way to the restaurant. Next, they sample food from whatever Nagare has prepared for the day. Then Koishi gives a brief interview to each new guest, inquiring the details of what they remember about the food, where they ate it and when, even with whom in some cases. Koishi schedules an appointment for them to return, then she discusses the details with her father, and he leaves to begin his research. The next paragraph is the guest returning to sample the meal two weeks later.

After the first two meals readers quickly pick up on the fact that Nagare is trying to give the guests more of an experience than the food. He often surprises the guests by digging deep into their pasts to uncover more information than the guest was willing to provide, but never in a negative way. The entire story is told, not shown, a nuance that may reflect more of Eastern writing styles than what Westerners are used to. It’s the happenings off the page that most mystery fans flock to books like this for. So this is more like the format of Henry Louis Gates’ Finding Your Roots documentary series.

But the story–and the dramatic elements and imagery with the food author Kashiwai evokes through Nagare–are lovely. Via the winter dish nabeyaki udan, beef stew, mackerel sushi, fried tonkatsu, Napolitan spaghetti, and nikuyaga stew, Kashiwai takes readers through a year of seasons in Japan, and a year in which an old man and his daughter honor the memory of his late wife and her mother. The tone is identical to that of many a Hayao Miyazaki anime film, and like that of moon cakes used as a storytelling device in the Chinese animated film Over the Moon.

Readers will need to just imagine the fun of following Nagare off the page as he explores the streets of Japan, interviewing people about long-gone restaurants, people who moved away decades ago, and experiences long-removed from the map from any number of reasons. But the story is still a great one-sitting read, sharing ideas about self-reflection along with ideas of dishes to sample the next time you’re at a Japanese restaurant (or something to hit up Japanese friends or relatives for).

Nagare is a fantastic character, who may remind you of what an elder Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto might be like in his retirement years. You may learn some new things, like the fact a frequent finicky visitor to Nagare’s restaurant stresses: Japanese meals do not feature a dessert course. And as the cover indicates, there is a cat in the stories. Droopy is a sleepy one, who doesn’t get enough attention, but you can see him/her amplified were the story to get the anime movie treatment one day.