Christmas miracles and The Kamogawa Food Detectives
On time travel through food and books, and finding our own doorways into Christmas.
Merry Christmas!
It’s hard to believe it’s this time again! In the past we have made our Christmas episodes about anticipating good food, extra reading time and getting into the festive spirit. This year that felt like a big ask. Perhaps it was after our Rivals binge, but the idea of escaping into magical Christmas spaces like the movies where Santa is real or reading Christmas stories about snowmen who come alive (Christmas Days by our favourite Jeanette Winterson) seemed like the perfect place to escape to.
We hope you enjoy this year’s Christmas episode (click below to listen) which is dedicated to the idea of food miracles. Everyday miracles of taste that give us an opportunity to escape into a different time or memory.
The book that helped us think about this is the gentle, whimsical Japanese novel, The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai.
Down a quiet backstreet of Kyoto exists a very special restaurant called the Kamogawa Diner. Customers who can find the hidden establishment are treated to an extravagant meal, but it’s not the main reason for visiting…
The father-daughter duo who own the restaurant have started advertising their services as ‘food detectives’, capable of recreating a dish from their customers’ pasts that may well hold the key to unlocking forgotten memories and ongoing happiness.
This book is a true example of meals leaving their shape!
There are six customers and six meals that are recreated in the book, each meal being it’s own chapter along with the story about the customer. All of them offer what we could call taste therapy…
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