The Kamogawa Food Detectives The Heartwarming Japanese Bestseller

A heartwarming read that’s all about food and memories. This cozy story follows a detective duo, a father and daughter team, who specialize in recreating customized dishes. Their job is to track down the exact taste of a dish someone once loved, digging into the person’s past and gathering clues from the people, restaurants, or grocery stores that helped make the dish a part of their life. Whether it's a wife’s comforting udon, a first love’s hearty beef stew, or an ex-husband’s signature pork chop, every dish is wrapped in memories. Super cute. Super cute cat cameo too.

Any dish in this book harbours a secret that might change the eater’s life forever. I believe in the saying that a dish can bring up long-forgotten memories as soon as you smell or eat it. Every new chapter sparked my anticipation anew. What kind of dish will it be? Will Nagare be successful with the investigation with the information given by the customer? Those dishes are described in such detail as if you were sitting at the table. The Kamogawa Food Detectives is my first book by a Japanese author. I still don’t know why I wasn’t interested in those authors before. This book is a good starting point to begin, and there are many more to come. I enjoyed the first part so much that I have already begun to read the second part. I can’t wait to see what dishes and secrets are awaiting me.

As a fan of Studio Ghibli movies, I knew I had to pick up this book. Nagare and his daughter Koishi Kamogawa aren’t simply serving delicious food, they also help their customers find recipes to their estranged ex-husbands most famous dish, their favourite childhood dish, etc. Within two weeks notice, they try and also accomplish finding recipes and tastes long forgotten. While not exactly character driven, the book isn’t plot driven as well. It is a cozy and short read, for when you are looking for just the right amount of very detailed stories (main focus on food and its background) and lovely characters.