Fiction Reviews
The Menu of Happiness
(2016 / 2025) Hisashi Kashiwai, Tor, £14.99, hrdbk, 223pp, ISBN 978-1-035-06071-9
(Translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood.)
Sneaking through SF² Concatenation’s finely-tuned Mainstream Fiction Repulsion Grid by means of a homeopathic dose of magic realism, The Menu of Happiness is the third in a series by Hisashi Kashiwai. These books focus on Nagare and Koishi Kurosawa (father and daughter) who run a restaurant-cum-detective agency in Kyoto.
Rather than solving crimes or running humdrum surveillance, the Kurosawas’ form of detection is a little more esoteric. Their clients ask them to recreate exactly a past meal – noodles made by the long-lost love of their life; omelette rice cooked by an old school-friend’s mother, an estranged daughter’s curry.
As a former police investigator turned master chef, Nagare Kurosawa is ideally placed to provide this service. Once the customer has been interviewed by Koishi, he then works out the right ingredients and seasoning through a combination of fieldwork and culinary experimentation.
Each of the six stories follows the same arc, beginning with a meal and an interview. The client then returns again to hear the results of the investigation, sample the meal and (invariably) achieve some kind of resolution.
For example: Sakyo Kataoka is a dancer of the modern school with a father who would rather he was following in the family tradition of Japanese Noh theatre. He’d like to eat again the exact same soba noodles in broth he ate during one of their many conversations about his career. Nagare gives him his noodles, but in doing so also a deeper understanding of what his father was trying to tell him.
You could say the Kurosawas are providing a Proustian culinary experience – one which returns diners to a particular time in their lives, perhaps a point of crisis, which they hope will give them some insight or closure.
I found The Menu of Happiness to be a slim but charming volume, providing mouth-watering descriptions of Japanese food and parable-like storytelling in equal measure. Nagare and Koishi move through the cycle of each mystery like Holmes and Watson, each with their assigned role (chef/detective and interviewer/assistant), hitting more or less the same beats at the same times, but not to the detriment of this reader’s enjoyment.
Kashiwai may have a formula, but the formula works!
And as other have pointed out long before me, you can use the traditional format of the detective story as a solid foundation to include many interesting and innovative elements alongside that. Here, we have fine dining and the search for emotional catharsis providing the special sauce on top of the meat and potatoes underneath.
If I was nitpicking, I would note that daughter Koishi is very much the traditional sidekick. She does not get a lot to do other than interview clients and act as a conversational foil for her father. And for some readers the law of diminishing returns might start to kick in towards the latter stories once the repetition becomes apparent. But these are quibbles rather than major flaws.
There is no overtly genre element to The Menu of Happiness, except for the thought that good food is itself an enchantment and the fact that Nagare is always uncannily correct. And of course, that each story features a cat as a recurring character… perhaps it would be best to say that the book is certainly open to fantastical readings and misreadings.
This originally came out in Japan in 2016 and this 2025 edition marks its first outing in the British Isles.
I would highly recommend this to fans of cosy detective fiction, culinary writing and all things Japanese. Distinctive and epicurean – overall a welcome surprise.
Tim Atkinson
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