The Kamogawa Food Detectives

 The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai (trans. Jesse Kirkwood), 201 pages.

Father and daughter pair Nagare and Koishi run both the (extremely hidden) Kamogawa diner and the attached Kamogawa detective agency. The detective agency doesn't solve crimes, rather it uses Nagare Kamogawa's police detective background to track down the details of dishes from client's memories and recreate them perfectly. This series of six related vignettes follow clients requesting these services for all manner of reasons. 

This book sounds extremely cozy, and it is that, but unfortunately I found it a bit of a letdown overall. Mostly because I found it very repetitive. In each chapter the client: struggles to find the restaurant and isn't sure it's the right place, enjoys a meal that is vividly described in the diner, follows the hall back to the detective agency and comments on the food photos on the walls, gives an extremely vague description of the food they're looking for with a couple of mysterious details, and Koishi says this will be a difficult one. Then we come back a couple weeks later and Nagare describes what all of the mysterious half-remembered details meant and how he successfully recreated the dish, then the client leaves and Koishi and Nagare plan their own dinner. I also found that the prose reminded me a lot of a middle grade book, which made the book a very quick read, but didn't particularly impress me. I suspect this book might be more enjoyable if I knew more about the very specific regions and dish brands we spend a lot of time on, but overall I'm afraid this one was a bit disappointing for me, especially since it seemed so precisely like the kind of book I would be interested in. I do think people looking for a tidy and low stakes book might enjoy it as an easy and relaxing read.