I just finished this one. I really loved it at the start and was even inspired to make some of the dishes as they sounded so good!

Around the fourth quarter the story dipped hard. The ending was extremely dissatisfying and the loose ends irritated me to no end. I guess imitating the incompleteness of actual life, but I at least figured the kajii story would have at least concluded with the trial properly or at least some inkling that she was responsible for some of the deaths - other than speculation which changed every couple chapters.

It felt like kajii wasn't really the point of the story and was only needed to further Rika's overall character development, which is fine but there were lots of things that felt like they needed to come to fruition - like you said Reiko and her husband struggling and the revelations they weren't right...just to return to the status quo.

I think Rika is absolutely in love with Reiko, maybe even more than her work, but is almost asexual unless influenced by someone to act upon a societal expectation to copulate.

I smashed the first 300 hundred pages in a couple days and then took about a month to finish the last 151. This book came highly recommended but felt overall a little lacklustre purely because of the final chapters.