What if you spent hours on a dish that tasted really bad?

It’s easy to understand why Asako Yuzuki’s novel has gotten so popular. She’s a deeply introspective author who has got a great ear for all those thoughts about food and the body, that we have all had but have never said out loud. Ever so often I found myself forced to put the book down and spend a little time thinking about what she’d just said. A lot of food for thought if you will.

Unfortunately she’s got a great ear but terrible taste! Early on I knew I was in trouble because none of the food she was talking about sounded like they tasted any good. Being from a land of spices I found myself baffled by how anyone could be so moved by the bland and elaborate concoctions that Yuzuki mercilessly elaborates on. You must really be deprived if butter is driving you nuts. Imagine if she found out about Ghee?

This isn’t a bad book but a frustrating one. The first few chapter have so much promise, using a well tested recipe. It uses the conceit of a detective novel. Rika could be the inquisitive but hapless Watson and her friend Rieko- Holmes. It should be a piece of cake – which is used perfectly when the story begins – but the author throws this out the window.

The tasteless substitute is agonising detail about every bland French Dish and stray thought the protagonist has about her rather ordinary life. It’s worth talking about but you are supposed to blend that it in with the spicy murder mystery that people came for in the first place! Maybe her editor fell asleep but did we really need to have so much of the protagonist’s tedious inner monologue?

This reminded me of Sacred Games in how the author gets so caught up in their navel gazing  that they forget they are writing a crime thriller. Other authors have attempted the same feat and understood that you need some sort of action or movement to keep your readers sated. Haibane Renmi for example has even less action baked into its premise yet is still a perfectly cooked encapsulation of self acceptance and friendship.

I don’t even mind the fact that so much of the text is descriptive, Alan Moore’s Promethia is proof enough that you can dump the old adage about Showing and not Telling if you are creative enough. Yuzuki is not that creative and decides to imitate the myriad food blogs that litter the internet mixing unprompted personal tales between their undercooked recipes. So much time is wasted listing every possible question or thought about something that has just happened. Why explain so much about someone staring at any oven and not the murderer who actually did the interesting stuff? Surely that was the bigger fish to fry?

A friend of mine complained that so much tension was built up between Rika and Rekio which was left completely unused. The same can be said about so much of the story and about nearly every character’s relationship with each other. Yuzuki has a keen eye that is able to pick up on how people relate to and hide from each other. She describes them in the most interesting ways but so many friendships that are thrown in are an afterthought.

The central murder mystery clearly needed more time in the oven. It goes nowhere. Why write a story about a journalist who’s bad at their job? Why not offer something spicy instead of long insights into the world’s most suggestible woman who may write the most boring opinion column in history? Nothing that this novel wants to explore is alien to me. None of the uncomfortable notions about the body and society are off-putting to me. I had an appetite for what the cook promised. Even the villain built from the authors own fears and complexes so boldly presented seemed tantalising.

So many good ingredients but the dish just doesn’t come together. Every metaphor she uses, like little Balaji, is tortured like a boiled lobster. You could cut about two hundred pages from this book and it would be better for it. The happy ending and the friendships that are supposed to differentiate the protagonist from the antagonist are half baked. Kanjii basically disappears from the novel taking with her anything interesting about this story with her. You should not write a detective novel and tell the reader you don’t know how the murders happened – it’s like a joke with no punchline.

Most importantly none of the food that the characters bloviate about sound good! Why would I want to listen to how you roast a bland bird? It reminded me of how Murakami looks at American Cultural detritus and presents them with wonder. It sucks. It sounds awful and I’m sure it tastes bad. If someone made this poor woman taste Indian food she’d experience Jouissance before exploding.