Review: The Kamogawa Food Detectives Translated By Jesse Kirkwood

I know this restaurant. Not the Kamogawa Diner, of course, since it does not exist, but that kind of restaurant. Kashiwai Hisashi based it on a real place near Higashi Hongan-ji that has since closed. The narrow building without a sign. The noren that is not there. The feeling, walking down a Kyoto backstreet in December, that the city is keeping something from you and that the something is warm and smells of dashi.

I read The Kamogawa Food Detectives, which is called Kamogawa Shokudō in the original and published by Shōgakukan in 2013, in a single afternoon on a delayed train from Kyoto to Nagoya, which is almost too appropriate. I then read the English translation by Jesse Kirkwood on a flight to Rome a few weeks later. The two readings produced two different books, and I want to talk about both.

The premise is simple and good. A father-daughter pair run a small diner in Kyoto. The father, Nagare, is a retired police detective and an extraordinary cook. The daughter, Koishi, manages the detective side of the business: a one-line advertisement in a food magazine — “Food: We find it” — draws clients who are searching for a dish from their past. A dead wife’s cooking. A grandfather’s snack from a childhood trip. The bowl of noodles from a restaurant that no longer exists. Nagare investigates, tracks down the recipe, re-creates the dish, and serves it. The client eats. Something that was unresolved becomes resolved. There are six stories, six clients, six dishes. A tabby cat named Hirune — or “nap” — sleeps in the corner.

I want to say that this is a lovely book, because it is a lovely book, and then I want to say what is wrong with it, because something is wrong with it, and the thing that is wrong with it is more interesting than the thing that is lovely.

What is lovely is the food.

Kashiwai is a Kyoto-born dentist who became a food and travel essayist before he became a novelist, and it shows. The omakase meals that Nagare serves each client before the main event — the remembered dish — are described with the kind of specificity that only a writer who has cooked the food himself can manage. I learned from the Wikipedia entry for Kamogawa Shokudō that Kashiwai actually prepared every dish in the novel before writing about it, which does not surprise me at all. The saba-zushi chapter, in which a sitting Prime Minister comes to the diner looking for a snack he ate fifty years ago, is worth reading for the description of the mackerel alone — the grain of the vinegared rice, the thickness of the kelp wrap, the way the fish is pressed. You can smell it. You want to eat it. This is a rare and specific talent and Kashiwai has it.

What is also lovely is Kyoto. The novel is soaked in the city the way the city is soaked in its own past. Kashiwai knows every street name, every temple, every seasonal shift. He writes Kyoto-ben — Kyoto dialect — with the ease of a man who has spoken it all his life, and the soft vowels of Koishi’s speech give the book a texture that no amount of plot could provide. The Japanese reviews on Booklog praise this specifically: one reader says the Kyoto-ben alone is worth the price of the book, and another says that reading it makes her want to visit Kyoto, which is the highest compliment a Kyoto writer can receive.

What is wrong with the book is the structure. Every story in The Kamogawa Food Detectives follows the same pattern. A client arrives. The client describes a dish. Koishi interviews the client. Nagare investigates. The dish is re-created. The client eats. The client cries, or almost cries, or does not cry but is deeply moved. The emotional knot is untied. The client leaves.

This happens six times.

By the third story you know what is going to happen. By the fifth you know exactly when in each chapter the emotional turn will come. The novel — and it is marketed as a novel, though it is really a linked story collection — has no cumulative movement. Nagare does not change. Koishi does not change. The cat does not change. The diner does not change. Each client arrives with a wound and leaves with it dressed, and the dressing is always the same: the right food, served at the right moment, by the right hands.

Several of the Japanese reviewers on Bookmeter noticed this and were divided. Some found the repetition comforting — one compared it to watching a well-made television serial, the same beats in the same order, each episode self-contained. Others found it frustrating. One reviewer wrote that the emotional payoffs felt forced because they arrived on schedule, and I agree with that reviewer. A surprise that you can see coming is not really a surprise. It is a ritual. Rituals are fine. Rituals are important. But a novel that is entirely ritual is a novel that has given up on the possibility that something might happen that the author did not plan.

I want to compare this, briefly, to a book it will inevitably be compared to: Kawaguchi Toshikazu’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold. That novel also has a magical establishment in a Japanese city. It also has clients who arrive with emotional burdens. It also resolves those burdens through a repeating mechanism — in Kawaguchi’s case, time travel via coffee rather than food. But Kawaguchi’s novel has one thing Kashiwai’s does not: rules that create genuine dramatic tension. The coffee gets cold. You cannot change the past. You must return before the cup is empty. These constraints make each chapter a negotiation between what the client wants and what the mechanism allows, and the negotiation produces stories that surprise. Kashiwai’s mechanism has no constraints. Nagare can find any dish. Nagare can re-create any dish. There is no dish too old, too obscure, too badly remembered. The outcome is never in doubt, and when the outcome is never in doubt, the story is not really a story. It is a demonstration.

I am being hard on this book, and I should say that I liked reading it, and that the nikujaga chapter — the businessman who wants his dead mother’s meat-and-potato stew — moved me despite the fact that I could see exactly where it was going. Kashiwai is a warm writer. He likes his characters. He likes food. He likes Kyoto. These are good things to like, and the affection comes through on every page. But affection is not enough to make fiction live, and the moments when The Kamogawa Food Detectives comes closest to real emotional complexity — the tonkatsu chapter, in which a divorced woman wants to re-create her dying ex-husband’s recipe — are the moments when the mechanism almost breaks, when the investigation almost fails, when the dish almost cannot be made. The word “almost” is doing all the work in those sentences, and the novel would have been a better novel if Kashiwai had let “almost” win at least once.

Now to the translation.

Jesse Kirkwood’s English is clean and readable and competent and I have a problem with it.

The problem is not that the translation is bad. It is not bad. The sentences are clear. The food descriptions survive. The plot, such as it is, comes through without distortion. A reader who picks this up in an airport bookshop and reads it on a flight will have a pleasant experience and will put it down feeling gently warmed, which is what the book intends. Kirkwood has done what he was asked to do.

The problem is what does not survive.

Kyoto-ben is gone. Koishi in the Japanese speaks with a softness and a particular rhythm that places her in Kyoto the way an accent places a person in a city — not through vocabulary but through the shape of the vowels, the trailing particles, the way a sentence ends. In Kirkwood’s English, Koishi speaks standard contemporary English. She is polite. She is pleasant. She could be from anywhere. The warmth of her speech, which is one of the genuine pleasures of the Japanese text, has been replaced by a neutral friendliness that does the job but does not do the thing that made the job worth doing.

I understand why. There is no good English equivalent of Kyoto-ben. It is not an accent that maps onto any English regional dialect without absurdity — you cannot have Koishi speak in a soft Edinburgh burr or a Charleston drawl and expect it to carry the same social meaning. Kirkwood chose neutrality, which is the safe choice and probably the defensible choice. But reading the English after the Japanese felt like eating a dish that had been re-created with all the right ingredients and none of the seasoning. The shape was correct. The taste was flat.

The food descriptions — the novel’s greatest strength — survive better than I expected. Kirkwood is good with sensory language. The saba-zushi still has its grain and weight. The nikujaga still steams. Where the Japanese allows Kashiwai to be very specific about regional ingredients and preparation techniques in a way that assumes a Japanese reader’s knowledge, Kirkwood finds English equivalents that are clear without being condescending. This is the part of the translation that works best, and it works well.

What works less well is tone. The Japanese narrator has a quality I would describe as gentle authority — the voice of a man who knows Kyoto intimately and is sharing it with you without rushing and without explaining too much. The English narrator is a little more eager. The sentences are a little shorter. The effect is slightly more commercial, slightly less contemplative. In a book where contemplation is most of what is on offer, this matters more than it would in a book with more plot.

One specific thing I noticed. The chapter epigraphs in the Japanese — brief phrases linking food and memory — have a proverbial quality in the original, a feeling of folk wisdom that has been polished by use. In the English they read as composed sentences. The difference is small and most readers will not notice. I noticed because I read both the original and the translation.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives is a book I am glad exists. It is warm, it is well-intentioned, it loves food and Kyoto and the idea that a bowl of noodles can mend what years have broken. It sold enormously in Japan — ten volumes now, and an NHK television adaptation — and I understand why. There is a hunger for this kind of fiction, fiction that is gentle and resolving and that ends with a meal rather than a crisis.

But I think it is a book that mistakes comfort for depth, and I think the translation, while competent, mistakes clarity for voice. The Japanese original is a minor work by a skilled essayist who became a minor novelist. The English translation is a faithful rendering of that minor work into a language that cannot quite carry the two things that made the original worth reading: the dialect and the food. The food mostly survives. The dialect does not.

I would recommend reading it on a train, preferably a long one, preferably in winter, preferably while hungry. It will not change your life. But it may make you want to eat something your grandmother made.

Book: 3 out of 5

Translation: 5 out of 10

by Misako Mikami

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