The Ex-Boyfriend's Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee by Saki Kawashiro Translator: Yuka Maeno
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: friendship fiction, relationship fiction, sad fluff, translated fiction, world literature, foodie fiction
Pages: 285
Published by Crown on December 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Based on the author’s true heartbreak story that went viral, and was discovered in Japan by the editor of the four-million-copy bestseller Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a charming novel about a woman who gets over a breakup by cooking her ex’s favorite recipe, and encourages others to do the same.
Twenty-nine-year-old Momoko has been tragically dumped. She thought she and her boyfriend were soulmates. He even took her to a love hotel, where she believed he was going to propose. Instead, he left her after four years.
So Momoko does what many broken-hearted people do—she gets incredibly drunk. So drunk that she passes out in an empty cafe. When she awakens, she’s eager to tell her story to anyone who will listen, and pours her heart out to a curious manager and the sole other customer in the cafe, a monk who trains at a temple nearby. When she starts to describe how she doted on her boyfriend, how he loved her cooking, the manager decides to indulge her, and allows her to slip into the kitchen, and cook up her ex’s favorite a warm, delightful butter chicken curry. As Momoko finishes telling her story, she realizes this combination of cooking and sharing has healed her heart in a way nothing else can.
The cafe is failing—subpar curry and a remote location has led to months of financial troubles. But as he devours Momoko’s dish, the manager gets an idea about how to save the what if they started doing this regularly, inviting in patrons to share stories about breakups, heartbreaks, and tragic endings, cooking dishes that meant something to the relationship? Like an unconventional therapy group, the “Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee” is born, with Momoko leading the Friday night sessions, and the monk-in-training offering blessings.
Inspired by the author’s actual experience working at a café where she posted a recipe called “My Ex’s Favorite Butter Chicken Curry,” The Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee is a magical, soul-nourishing comfort read for anyone who has loved and lost and loved again. With eight recipes included!
My Review:
There are no actual funerals in this book, only metaphorical ones. Considering the state of most of the clients of the Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee, if there actually WERE funerals, there would be a LOT of them, the recently deceased would probably have died in some gruesome way, and this would be an entirely different kind of book.
Instead, it’s rather a lot like Before the Coffee Gets Cold, which shouldn’t be a surprise as the author of THIS book was discovered by the author of THAT book.
Although the seed for this story is true. Or at least true-ish. Also really, really relatable, because the only people who have not been dumped from a romantic relationship in their whole, entire lives are either under the age of 10 (crushes count!) or have never in those lives put themselves out there in any way at all.
Momoko has just been dumped by her boyfriend of FOUR years – at a love hotel which adds a whole lot of insult to the injury. She’s invested four years of her life to doing her damndest to be the woman she thinks he wants, instead of the person she actually is. And she’s been so damn patient with him, so busy trying to play the part she thinks she’s supposed to, that she’s made excuses for all the terrible, and terribly rude and neglectful, signals he’s been sending that he wants to break up with her because he wants her to take care of that for him.
Which is kind of how he’s been operating for years by that point.
So yes, he’s been an asshole, she’s been complicit in his assholery, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. Which doesn’t help her deal with the fact that he’s been the focus of her life for four years and now everything in her life reminds her of him – because she’s made her life be that way.
And now she has to deal with the fallout of her romantic relationship. And she has to reckon with the fact that her job is toxic and now that’s all she’s got.
Which is where the Funeral Committee comes in – but only after Momoko finds herself in a rundown cafe on a quiet Tokyo sidestreet, drunk and sobbing her heart out.
She knows she needs to make some changes. She needs to make a LOT of changes. And she needs time to process her grief and move on. More importantly, Momoko needs to remember who SHE is and what SHE wants, and be herself in the world instead of who anyone thinks she’s supposed to be – even herself.
The recipe, the truly excellent Butter Chicken Curry recipe she invented and made for her ex, is the start of her healing process. First she makes it for the cafe’s manager and one of the regulars – and they both literally eat it up because it’s WAY better than anything the cafe’s ever served.
But as she’s cooking, processing her grief and reclaiming her love for the recipe she invented, the three of them have a revelation. She can help others just like they are helping her. All she has to do is quit her toxic job, take over the kitchen at the cafe, and once a week meet with someone who needs the same kind of healing she did to cook the recipe that meant the most in the relationship that they are grieving and lay those emotions to rest. Just as Momoko is trying to do – even if her success at that endeavor can only be measured in nanometers – if that.
Escape Rating A-: Books like this one have become their own kind of thing, and The Ex-Broyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee is a terrific example of it. The format is fairly simple, a series of loosely connected short stories connected by a place or a theme or a circumstance or all of the above, with an overarching story or theme about that connection.
In this particular case, the place is the Amayadori Cafe, the obvious theme is healing after a loss or a break-up, but mostly break-ups, and the connecting tissue is the “Funeral Committee”. In the case of this particular story, there’s also a less obvious theme about the masks that people wear, and just how difficult it is to set those masks aside and be authentic. For Momoko, and for the other women who tell their stories to the “committee” there’s an even deeper element about just how pervasive and restrictive the masks that women feel compelled to wear can be, and the way those masks are formed both by external pressure and internal adoption of that pressure.
Unlike many of the other books similar to this one, Momoko, the cafe manager Iori and the monk-in-training/regular customer Hozumi who becomes part of their inner circle, become a big part of each person’s story – and each other’s – instead of being confined to the background and/or small parts in smaller interconnecting bits between the stories. So this one feels more like a novel than many of the other books of this type.
Because these stories are all wrapped around loss, this definitely qualifies as “sad fluff”. Most of the stories are not about finding happiness. Either they are about finding closure – or they are focused on learning to live with the pain. And each of the three has their own tale and RECIPE to add to the committee’s archives. Their own stories don’t and in fact can’t lead to happy ever afters, at least not in the near term, but they can, and do, help each other deal with their respective losses. As all the best families do. Because that’s what they are, a found family.
Of all of the books of this type I’ve read, from Before the Coffee Gets Cold to Monday’s The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park, the book that this reminds me of the most is The Kamogawa Food Detectives, which is also one of my favorites in the genre. It’s not just that both are based around food, and it’s not even that neither includes so much as a whiff of magic. Instead it’s that the through story in both does a terrific job of keeping the linking team as an integral part of all the stories and that Momoko does specifically recreate a recipe for one of their clients, just as the ‘food detectives’ do.
I did like this one better than I did Hinode Park, because ALL of the stories in this novel, by the nature of the Funeral Committee, are centered on adult problems and adult relationships. It’s not that Hinode Park wasn’t good and wasn’t a good book for the mood I was in, but this one just had characters whose shoes I could slip into better. (Everyone’s reading mileage probably varies from each other’s on this particular point.)
All of that being said, The Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee isn’t just a cute title. It’s a charming book that plucks at the reader’s emotions even as it soothes the characters within who really need to lay at least a bit of their pasts to rest. It might even give the reader the opportunity to do the same.
If that doesn’t work, the reader certainly has the chance to eat their feelings along with the Committee. All the recipes are included and they look like YUM!
This sounds like an interesting story. I like the idea of cooking to get over heartbreak, as I love to cook. Thanks for sharing this one.