The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai (G.P. Putnam's Sons, release date February 13, 2024)

Tucked away on a street near Kyoto’s Higashi Honganji Temple lies a hidden restaurant. No sign directs customers to it. A one-line advertisement in Gourmet Monthly gives no contact information, only two names: The Kamogawa Diner and The Kamogawa Detective Agency. For those who manage to find this place, they discover that it has no menu but the owner serves whatever food he has cooked for that day on the finest of lacquerware and Baccarat crystal plates. Clearly this is no ordinary diner.

Although the food is made from the best ingredients, what draws customers to search for this place is the  detective agency. Each one of them is haunted by a dish they had in the past, with flavors they’ve been unable to replicate or find in any other restaurant and with memories they hope to relive if they can only find the exact replica, faithful in every detail. 

This is what the Kamogawa Detective Agency promises its clients. After learning every piece of information that is remembered about where and when they had this food and any detail they recall about its taste and presentation, the owner scours Japan for it, tracking down every minute clue that has been given to him. If he succeeds, he charges nothing but what the client wants to give.

The stories told by the six customers in this book are charming and resonant. One man wants a simple meal that his dead wife used to make for him. A woman hopes to eat a dish she once left unfinished because her date unexpectedly proposed marriage to her as their meal was put on the table. Another hopes to restore her ex-husband’s vanished memory, stolen by dementia, if she can feed him the food that once only he was able to make. Since everyone in the world has a particular culinary memory that they would love to taste one more time, these people are ones readers can easily take to heart--but they aren’t the core of this novel.

Author Hisashi Kashiwai is a Kyoto dentist with a passion for food and the skills of a forensic kitchen detective. He is aware of every detail that makes a dish extraordinary and he divulges them all. Whether it’s the way water drawn from different regions can change flavors or how pouring tea over a helping of rice can enhance the taste, Kashiwai generously divulges these little secrets. His descriptions of the meals served in the diner or tracked down by an indefatigable expert dominate his book. If you aren’t a devotee of Japanese cuisine, you will be by the time you finish reading about all the dishes Kashiwai describes so well,

None of his choices are haute cuisine. They’re simple dishes that people eat as everyday meals but their ingredients turn them into unique culinary art. Hishashi makes the regional differences in Japanese cooking something to yearn for, along with the use of ingredients that are only available in their particular season. Slivers of taro in mackerel sushi, taro found only in a small village, elevates the flavor as nothing else can and canned meat, cooked cleverly, can rival the finest Kobe beef. 

Kashiwai is also a devoted lover of Kyoto and reveals the magic of his hometown in a few quick sentences. Sprinkled among the luscious descriptions of food are quick glimpses of the gingko trees that turn the city to gold in the fall, the mountains that loom white in the winter, the courtyards filled with spring cherry blossoms, and the mists and shadows that bring mystery to the streets in the rainy season. “There was nowhere like Kyoto to make you really notice the changing of the seasons,” one client observes as he approaches the diner.

Although The Kamogawa Food Detectives is being compared to the series that was launched by Before the Coffee Gets Cold, (Asia by the Book, February 2023), Kashiwai published this two years before the Coffee series began. He’s followed it with The Restaurant of Lost Recipes, a sequel that’s not yet available in the U.S. which gives promise of a series in the offing.

More dishes? More intriguing ingredients? Sign me up for a Kyoto food tour, please, Mr. Kashiwai!~Janet Brown

Songs on Endless Repeat by Anthony Veasna So (HarperCollins)

“I have less in common with mainstream Asians, like Chinese, Japanese, the usual suspects, than say middle-aged Jewish people because…both older Jewish folks and young Cambos have parents who either survived or died in a genocide!”

Here is the voice of Anthony Veasna So, who died when he was 28, just months before his book of short stories, Afterparties, (Asia by the Book, August 2021) was published and acclaimed by everyone from the New Yorker to popsugar.com. This offhand line from one of the characters in the recently published posthumous collection of work by So, Songs on Endless Repeat, echoes with absolute truth. The person who would most appreciate and envy that line would now be one of those “older Jewish folks” if he hadn’t, like So, died from a drug overdose--the comedian Lenny Bruce.  

So himself took the microphone as a stand-up comedian. He also was a scathing cartoonist, an artist who painted enigmatic self portraits. A writer whose fiction was published in the New Yorker and Granta, he signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins when he was in his mid-twenties. At the time of his death, he was immersed in writing that second book, “a first novel draft [that] will definitely push the limits of digestible length.” 

HarperCollins paid $300,000 for Afterparties and for the novel that would follow. Determined to get their money’s worth after So’s death, they scraped together pieces of fiction and nonfiction, tossing it all into the crazy salad that’s become his second—and last—published book. They should never have done this. They looted a grave.

Songs on Endless Repeat is an incoherent mixture of five previously published essays, both in print and online, one lengthy and unpublished piece that delves into reality television, and eight chapters of the first draft that was meant to become his novel, Straight thru Cambotown. 

With a stunning lack of respect for this novel that will never be finished, HarperCollins sprinkled its chapters with haphazard abandon among the pieces of nonfiction, as though the portions of what were intended to begin a novel were random short stories. When read as they’re presented on the page, these chapters become staccato. They jangle and chafe. The characters float in a disembodied context, smoking weed, exchanging obscene wisecracks, presided over by a ghostly figure whose funeral is in the offing. They deserve a better showcase than this scattershot presentation, but the only way they’re going to get it is if their readers ignore the nonfiction that gets in their way and encounter each chapter in order, one after the other, as they would when reading a novel. When this way of reading takes place, then the mourning begins. So’s unpolished rush of fiction, his nascent sketches of characters, his tumbled flood of thoughts, all give promise of a book that would have stunned the literary world.

Vinny, Darren, and Molly, cousins whose childless aunt just died in a fiery car crash, are the dead woman’s prospective heirs. Their aunt was the Counter, a leading figure of her Cambodian community. She headed an improvised bank, with members who contributed to, borrowed from, and earned interest from the communal funds. The Counter was the one who collected and distributed the money, while taking her cut, and it’s rumored that she possessed a fortune. 

An inheritance from her would be welcomed by the cousins. Molly is back home after an unsuccessful stint as an artist in Manhattan, reluctant to sacrifice her dreams to a lucrative career. Vinny is the lead of the Khmai Khmong Rappers, who spits out rhymes in a mixture of Khmer and English in rhythms that hold his memories of the cadence voiced by Cambodian monks. Darren is making his way through the academic morass of graduate student stipends and applications for fellowships, while his thoughts are still influenced by his days as a stand-up comic, terse and cynical, with a vicious bite. 

His is the voice that dominates in these early chapters and his words are the ones that resonate. Describing Cambodian men at family gatherings, he classifies them by what they drink, “Heineken for the humble, Hennessey for the ballers.” A deeper class difference emerges among the men’s children when they reach middle school--are they going to become yellow or brown, choosing academic success or gangster rhythms, “Asian” or “Cambo”? Or will they sink into the mushy definition of Asian American, which Darren derides with his usual scathing insight, “Seriously, we don’t even eat the same grain of rice.”

While Afterparties examined the legacy inherited by the children of those who survived genocide, what’s offered in the opening chapters of So’s unfinished novel is the unwieldy balance between how to succeed in America without jettisoning the cultural roots of the Cambodian community. His final sentences give hints as to how this might have happened for the three cousins, who are forced to immerse themselves in their dead aunt’s livelihood before receiving the inheritance she’s left them. The sketches of Cambotown and its inhabitants give glimpses of a rich and devastating plot that will never come into being, and the sadness of So’s death becomes a matter of literary grief.

But he buries his conclusion among his torrent of words, where it emerges like a polished knife blade flashing in sunlight: “Some things are just lost. So don’t waste your life thinking about it.”~Janet Brown

The Boy and the Dog by Seishu Hase, translated by Alison Watts (Scribner)

There have been a number of confirmed cases of animals saving their owners or becoming so loyal that they wait for them even if their owners have died. The most famous is the story of Hachiko, an Akita dog that waited for its owner, Hidesaburo Ueno, at Shibuya station for over nine years after Ueno’s death. 

Although Seishu Hase is known in Japan for mostly writing Yakuza crime novels, in his book The Boy and the Dog, he has written a story about a dog named Tamon that makes a five-year journey across Japan to find his beloved owner. 

The book was originally published in the Japanese language as 少年と犬 (Shonen to Inu) in 2020 by Bungeishunju Limited. It won the Naoki Award in 2020. This edition, translated by Alison Watts, was published in English in 2023 by Scribner. 

It’s six months after the massive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that hit the Tohoku area of Japan on March 11, 2011. At a convenience store in Sendai, a man named Kazumasu, sees  a ragged looking dog standing on the corner of the parking lot. The dog is still there after he makes his purchase, just sitting and staring at him. 

The dog looks like a German shepherd mix and since there seems to be no owner, Kazumasa decides to take him home. He notices the dog’s collar with only the dog’s name on it - Tamon, named after Tamonten, a guardian deity. Kazumasa lives with his sister and their mother who suffers from dementia. She sometimes forgets the name of their children. When Kazumasa visits his mother with Tamon, she immediately calls the dog Kaito. 

Although their mother seemed to be happy and in good spirits whenever “Kaito” is with her, Kazumasa knew he needs to make more money so he could help out his sister and be able to put their mother in a home. He accepts a job as driver for a couple of foreign criminals and brings Tamon with him on the job. The job goes without a hitch and the foreign thieves believe that Tamon is their good luck charm. 

Kazumasa’s lucky streak came to an abrupt end. When he and the foreign thieves were being chased by a group of Yakuza, Kazumasa crashes the getaway van into a wall. Only Tamon and one of the thieves, Miguel, survive.

This is merely the start of Tamon’s journey. He travels with Miguel to Niigata, where the thief plans on stowing away on a boat to leave Japan. He can’t take Tamon with him so leaves Tamon in a secluded part of a mountain. A man who is training in the Japanese Alps is saved by a bear when Tamon chases it away from him. Although the runner encourages Tamon to come home with him, Tamon continues his journey. He’s is found by a prostitute named Miwa who finds him in the mountains of Shiga Prefecture. 

The day Miwa finds Tamon is the day she kills her boyfriend. She decides to turn herself in and lets the dog go. Tamon is then taken in by a man who lives alone on the mountain but he soon continues his journey south. 

In Kagoshima Prefecture, a small boy named Hikaru lives with his parents. The family moved here after the devastating quake. The experience has been a shock to him because he lost his friend Tamon. Since then, the boy has been unable to speak. 

Will Tamon and Hikaru ever be reunited? Can an animal and human be soulmates? Seishu Hase makes you think so. The story will make you believe in miracles. ~Ernie Hoyt

Tezcatlipoca by Kiwamu Sato, translated by Stephen Paul (Yen On)

Tezcatlipoca was originally published in the Japanese language in 2021 by Kadokawa Corporation. It won the Naoki Prize, a prestigious Japanese literary award and was heralded as one of the best mysteries by a number of other publications. It was translated into English and published in February of 2023 by Yen On Books. 

It’s one of the most astonishing and disturbing novels you will ever read. It blends Aztec mythology and culture with a dose of the mystical and supernatural along with drug cartels, the Yakuza, organized crime syndicates, and illegal activities of the present. The story moves from the drug cartel war zones in Mexico to the bustling city of Jakarta and ends up in the Kanto area of Japan. 

In order to truly understand the story, it may help to study up on the gods of Aztec culture. Tezcatlipoca is the God of Providence and is considered one of the four sons of  Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, two major deities known as the “Dual Gods”. The name Tezcatlipoca is usually translated as “smoking mirror” from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The festival celebrating Tezcatlipoca is called Toxcatl and involves a human sacrifice.

The story centers are three very different individuals—a Mexican drug lord on the run whose empire is taken over by another cartel, a neglected child who grows up to commit a terrible crime and is locked away for an extended period of time, and a Japanese heart surgeon who loses his license and becomes an illegal organ broker. 

Koshimo, the child of a Mexican mother and Yakuza father, grows into a big strong teenager and when he finds his drunken father beating his mother, he easily overpowers him and breaks his neck with his bare hands. His mother is having a flashback of her brother being killed by a narco so she attacks her protector. Koshimo hits her with one hard slap and she’s dead. He casually walks down the stairs to the first-floor hardware store and asks the owner to call the police. Koshimo is only thirteen. 

In September 2015, a newspaper article reports that the latest drug war is reaching its final stage after two years of fighting. As is true of the hometown of Koshimo’s mother, Sinaloa is now the battleground between old Los Casasola and the Dogo Cartel, who will replace them. “The amount of cocaine that crosses the border won’t change. And neither will the United States’ status as the biggest market place”. 

Valmira Casasola is the only surviving member of Los Casasolas, after they’ve been ousted by the Dogo Cartel, and Valmira is fleeing for his life. However, he plans to start from scratch to build a new empire and vows to take down the Dogo Cartel. He’s been in on the run for quite a while and ends up in Indonesia working at a food cart that sells cobra satay. 

After their Catholic father died, Valmero and his three brothers were indoctrinated into the belief of their abuela, Libertad, who was a firm believer in all of the Aztec gods. As an adult, Valmiro also becomes more enamored with his indigenous heritage. His food cart in the market is just a cover for selling illicit drugs on the side so he can make contacts to build his empire. It’s here that he meets a Japanese man who calls himself Tanaka. 

Tanaka, or Suenaga as we find out later, is an organ broker for a Chinese gang and a militant Islamic organization. However, his main desire is to go back to the operating room in a clean environment. He doesn’t want to be just any back-alley doctor. He believes his skills could be used in a more productive way.

The two men, former drug kingpin and disgraced heart surgeon, form a plan to corner the market on illegal heart transplants. They present their plan to the Chinese gang and to an officer of the militant group and a nefarious web of evil is about to be loosed upon the world. What evil will befall the world? Only the God Tezcatlipoca might know the answer. ~Ernie Hoyt

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan (Simon & Schuster)

“We have your daughter,” are words that would strike terror in any mother’s heart, especially when they’re spoken over the phone by a police officer. Frida Liu is certain that whatever this statement might forebode, she’ll be able to clear it up. She’s a solid citizen, employed by the  Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the possessor of a Bachelor’s degree from Brown and a Master’s from Columbia, who contributes to a 401 (k) and a college savings account for her baby daughter. Although it’s true that she left her eighteen-month-old alone for over two hours, it’s also true that she’s a divorced mother whose brain was fogged from sleeplessness. Awake for the better part of two nights, comforting her daughter while she worked from home, she had gone to her office to pick up papers she needed to complete a job, began to check work emails, and lost track of time.

Negligent? Yes. Criminally negligent? Of course not. Anybody would understand that this is a forgivable offense--even her ex-husband and his new wife have forgiven her lapse of judgment. Frida devotes her life to her child during the 3.5 days she has custody of Harriet. When she considers her own childhood and the stern upbringing given by her immigrant parents, she’s certain Harriet is being given an enviable childhood.

This isn’t the point of view taken by Child Protective Services. A social worker sends her to a psychiatrist who takes one look at her and immediately asks “Is English your first language?” He follows this up later with the condescending response of “Aren’t you a smart cookie.” Frida has become a lesser form of human life in the eyes of authorities and is sent to a year of rehab in a live-in facility with other women who have failed as mothers.

Although offenses range from one mother letting her eight-year-old daughter walk home alone from the nearby library to another who posted a video of her child’s tantrum on social media to those who have physically injured their offspring, the mothers are all lumped together in an indistinguishable mass, with a mantra that they all recite regularly: “I am a bad mother but I am learning to be good.” To help them achieve this goal, each of them is given a robot child of the same age and race as the child that was taken from them. Powered by AI, these replicas of children have the brains and emotions of their human equivalents. They also hold data taken from their “mothers” that’s scrutinized and assessed to see if progress is being made by the women who care for them.

While suffering from the separation from their own children, the women are given rigorous standards to meet as they become parents to robots. Submerging their own speech and personality in the melodic, gentle tones of “motherese,” they face demands that are progressively more difficult, with a new one appearing the minute they’ve mastered the last. But the real progress they make is unmeasured. As they work toward a common goal, the women begin to nurture each other, a form of parenthood that goes under the school’s radar. As the mothers become softer and more tender, they become more vulnerable and this counts against them. They become emotionally involved with their robotic “children,” but are their words and actions being elicited by the robots as a form of entrapment?

Jessamine Chan has written a harrowing novel, based upon a true case in which a mother left her five-year-old child alone in the house for a few hours and lost him forever. Like Frida, this mother was raised by parents from another culture and like Frida, she was diminished by the way she was treated by authorities in the bureaucratic world of social welfare.

Layering and enlarging upon this history, Chan has added elements of dystopian and speculative fiction with dashes of pure horror, creating an Orwellian nightmare that seems perilously close to coming true. Her novel portrays every mother’s worst fear—that she’s not up to the task of keeping a child mentally and physically healthy, well loved, and securely cared for.

“Maybe people should have to work up to children, from plants to pets to babies,” Frida tells herself, “Maybe they should all be given a five-year-old, then four, then three, then two, then one…Why did they have to begin with a baby?” This question echoes throughout Chan’s novel as Frida painfully makes her way through the School for Good Mothers.~Janet Brown

君たちはどう生きるか (Kimitachi wa Dou Ikiruka?) by Genzaburo Yoshino, manga by Shoichi Haga (Magazine House) Japanese text only

The latest Studio Ghibli animation film borrows its Japanese title from a 1938 novel of the same name by Genzaburo Yoshino. However, the film is totally unrelated to the story. I read an updated version of the book in manga form in its original language. The title 君たちはどう生きるか (Kimitachi wa Dou Ikiruka) translates to How Will You Live. The manga was drawn by Shoichi Haga and was published by Magazine House in 2017.

Although it is written in the manga format, about a third of the book is text with no pictures. The story is set in 1937 in Tokyo. The main character is a fifteen-year old junior high school boy named Shoichi Honda, whom everybody calls Koper (short for Copernicus in Japanese). 

The story opens with Shoichi lying in bed with a fever. He wishes his fever would get worse. He can’t forgive himself for his cowardly action. He tells his uncle, a former editor who has recently moved into his neighborhood, everything that happened and is wondering why he is suffering so much.

Shoichi tells his uncle that he saw his friends being bullied by upperclassmen but he did nothing to help. He feels he betrayed his friends. The following day, his uncle hands him a single notebook. 

Shoichi’s uncle explains to him in the notebook that the reason for his suffering is because Shoichi is trying to follow the right path. Shoichi knows what he did was wrong and believes his friends would be unforgiving and yet he knows he must do something to make things right with them. This is just a prelude to what his uncle writes to him in the notebook. 

The story then goes back to the beginning when Shoichi’s uncle moved into town. After Shoichi helps his uncle move, the two of them take a tram and go to the roof of a department building. Shoichi looks down on all the people and says to his uncle that they all look like molecules. After they get back home and part ways, his uncle says his great discovery today that people are like molecules was similar to Copernicus and thus he was given the nickname Koper. 

The book is mostly a coming of age story as Shoichi, or Coperu, makes new discoveries and learns more about human nature. His uncle continues to write messages in the notebook about each and every discovery that Shoichi makes. Shoichi tries his best to understand what his uncle is trying to convey and in the end he writes his own response to his uncle’s words. He makes a resolution as to how he will live his life in the future.

After reading the book, the thought that crossed my mind the most was what would I do if one of my uncles gave me a notebook with philosophical meanderings that are more than two pages long. I think I would set the notebook aside and not read it. I even asked one of my junior high students if they read the book in its entirety. The response - “Only the manga parts”. 

The manga form does make it a lot easier to understand and the book itself asks the readers at the end, “How will you live?” It is only up to you to decide.~Ernie Hoyt

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova (Graywolf Press)

Borders are mysterious and often troublesome divisions that shift according to political whims and military actions. Only continents, surrounded by oceans,  seem to have borders that resist argument--except for the blurred and amorphous line that separates Europe from Asia. According to the National Geographic Society, this is “an imaginary line, running from the northern Ural Mountains in Russia south to the Caspian and Black Seas.” But to Kapka Kassabova the border between the two continents is found where “Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey converge and diverge…where something like Europe begins and something else ends that is not quite Asia.”

If this definition has a tinge of magic to it, it’s because that’s what Kassabova finds along that hidden border. She grew up within its periphery and it calls to her from her home in Scotland. Alone, she returns to the part of Bulgaria that shaped her early life and begins an exploration that’s both spiritual and geographic. She wants to “see the forbidden places of my childhood…that had been out of bounds for two generations.” What she finds is Stranja, an unimaginable wilderness of forest and mountains, scantily inhabited, filled with legends, impermanence, and death.

The history of this part of the world goes beyond the years of the Iron Curtain, when Russian rule turned the region into a “forested Berlin Wall.” Stranja is where people ignore dangers to make a new life in other countries, running from the Soviet bloc, from the Balkan Wars, from Syria. If they’re lucky, they find guides who will lead them along the treacherous paths of The Road to Freedom--or they may end up in unmarked graves.

Kassabova begins her journey by staying still, in one place, in a village of 200 people where women are rumored to have the power of the evil eye, and firewalkers converge upon a sacred spring in an annual ritual that unites Christians and Muslims, Greeks and Bulgarians. “Beware,” she’s told as she becomes a fixture in the village. Stranja, she learns, is a place that’s hard to enter and is even more difficult to  leave. 

Yet Kassabova lingers there, learning the stories of residents, rediscovering myths, and finding details of lost history that may never have been true. As she delves into the past, the present becomes darker and she realizes “some things are beyond repair.” When she moves on, she’s haunted by the irreparable. “We are not Europe and we are not Asia,” an Eastern Orthodox priest tells her and his words are echoed in other ways by everyone she meets. Every village in Stranja is its own nation-state, created by its unique and repetitive history, and filled with “ a grieving sensation difficult to describe.”

In a village where people are famous for their longevity, Kassabova is accompanied by dogs that look like “shag-pile carpets on long legs” and as she eats a cup of sheep’s yogurt by the side of a road, a bear comes into view and vanishes into the undergrowth. Everyone she meets is given full voice in unforgettable character sketches, from the human-smuggler whom she flees from on a deserted mountain road to the beautiful woman who walked for a week to reach the Greek border and now lives on the Street of Widows, growing the roses that once were her dead husband’s favorite flower. 

Border is a trip back into the past, a foray into the future, a quest for home. In this undefined part of the world, it doesn’t matter which continent claims the region. It’s a place people pass through in search of safety and they have done so throughout recorded time. Because she was born into it, Kapka Kassabova was almost reclaimed by it. What she found there the rest of us can only discover through her words in her strange, illuminating, and seductive book.~Janet Brown