The Kamogawa Food Detectives

Kashiwai, Hisashi. The Kamogawa Food Detectives. Translated by Jesse Kirwood, New York : G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2024.

Kashiwai, Hisashi. The Restaurant of Lost Recipes. translated by Jesse Kirkwood, New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2024].

Moving and deliciously cozy, The Kamogawa Food Detectives shows that a meal is never just a meal: it can be both the window to a long-forgotten past and the key to a more fulfilling future. 

The book centers on the Kamogawa Diner, housed in a nondescript building along the backstreets of Kyoto. Run by Nagare Kamogawa and his daughter, Koishi, the diner provides delectable meals, along with a unique service for their customers… The two are culinary detectives, recreating special dishes from a person’s memory through painstakingly detailed investigations. 

Each chapter is its own vignette, detailing a meal that the father-daughter duo recreate for an inquiring customer of the Kamogawa Diner–from beef stew to tonkatsu to Napolitan spaghetti. Fair warning: do not read these on an empty stomach. The descriptions of the meals are mouth-watering and lush, often weaving a story of nostalgia into the ingredients and the way the dishes are prepared, pulling the reader even further into the story until their stomach rumbles with each turn of the page. Underneath the nostalgia and aromatic cuisine, the customers of the Kamogawa Diner find something remarkable: comfort, wisdom, or closure. 

We return to Kyoto in the sequel, The Restaurant of Lost Recipes, where Koishi and Nagare Kamogawa continue to put their detective work to the test with more culinary mysteries.

Perfect for fans of cozy literary fiction and magnificent food writing, these books are–at their heart–a love letter to the relationship between food, memory, and the power of human connection. Both The Kamogawa Food Detectives and The Restaurant of Lost Recipes are available as a physical copy at your local library and as an audiobook via Libby. 

 Sara Durbin is a Library Assistant at Graham Public Library. They can be reached at sdurbin@alamancelibraries.org