Edible Nostalgia: Intersection of Food and Memory in Hisashi Kashiwai’s The Kamogawa Food Detectives

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_17How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Culinary Nostalgia; Memory Triggers; Gastronomic Experience; Personal Historiography

Abstract

This paper presents the analyses of Hisashi Kashiwai’s The Kamogawa Food Detectives through the theoretical lenses of Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus and Marcel Proust’s involuntary memory. Kashiwai portrays the cherished memory associated with a partially forgetten dish of the clients who visit the father – daughter duo, the proprietors of a discreet Kyoto eatery. The proprietors succour clients recover a treasured experience through detection and cautious culinary reconstruction. The gastronomic sleuthing works as tool for indicating how natural inclinations like tastes and social histories constitute Bourdieu’s habitus. Yet refracted by the shifting conditions of contemporary Japanese society, each client’s requirement is rooted in the sedimented cultural capital of their upbringing in terms of culinary heritage, class-coded dining etiquette, and tacit bodily know-how. The episodic narrative of the novel journey towards Proust’s idea of involuntary memory erupted through senses by collapsing temporal distance and re-animating faded affective worlds. The sensory trigger is not the accidental madeleine but a deliberately crafted plate, clustered through oral testimony and the chefs’ intuitive grasp of regional foodways. The recreated dishes serve as mnemonic keys which enables characters to reconcile estranged relationships. This study states how Kashiwai stages food as a site where habitus and involuntary memory intersect, where the remembered dish is not a pure retrieval but a re-embodiment of the clients’ life trajectory. The novel’s structure mirrors the cooking process, while its affective resolution hinges on the sensory immediacy of gustatory and olfactory stimuli. In mapping the narrative’s interplay between memory and embodied social wisdom, Kashiwai’s work contributes to ongoing conversations in food studies about memory, identity, and the cultural politics of taste.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - P. Megavarshini
AU  - K. S. Saradhambal
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
TI  - Edible Nostalgia: Intersection of Food and Memory in Hisashi Kashiwai’s The Kamogawa Food Detectives
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Food Studies: Intersections of Culture, Science and Sustainability (ICEFS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 187
EP  - 194
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_17
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_17
ID  - Megavarshini2026
ER  -