The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Wash It All Away

For two years, Wakana Kinme has run a laundry service in the seaside resort town of Atami. Kinme Cleaning is a well-loved business, and Atami residents admire Wakana's devotion to her trade. She builds a fulfilling life, making friends with the locals and visiting hot springs. Although Wakana does not know her own past, her cleaning services safeguard memories imbued in customers' precious items.

Wash It All Away is based on Mitsuru Hattori's Wash It All Away manga. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

Normally, this is the kind of premiere that I'd give 3.5 stars: not my thing, but respectable nonetheless. Four-star ratings are for series I'm at least seriously considering watching. However, I must break my rubric for the sake of Wash It All Away, an iyashikei series I am highly unlikely to watch more of, but executed with such beauty and aplomb that I cannot help but applaud it.

Part of my admiration is contextual. Laundry service is a natural choice for a series like this: meditative in a way that a lot of people enjoy, finding satisfaction in the emptying of a hamper, the restoration of a garment, a dresser full of clean shirts. While it feels more Sisyphean to me than anything else (my meditative household task of choice being cooking), the satisfaction Kinme derives from it makes sense to me. It's a facet of life that everyone interacts with, whether they're personally doing laundry or asking an expert to get a stain out of their favorite garment, but it involves a surprising depth of knowledge at the higher levels. Anime with a similarly contemplative tone about things like fishing don't touch me, having never held a fishing rod, but I understand the act of washing clothes.

The choice of Atami for the setting also contributes to the tone. Atami is a resort town, known for its seaside as well as its hot springs, but it has a relatively small population. The hills, sandy beaches, and alleyways create an idyllic beauty that sets the stage for the intimacy between Kinme and her clients and the quiet rhythms of her life. It's the kind of life we cityfolk like to think people live in these tourism-heavy towns: slow-paced and full of simple joys. It's not particularly realistic, but neither is a young woman singlehandedly running a dry-cleaning and laundry business with joy and relaxation. It's just nice to imagine things working that way.

But wow, Sayumi Suzushiro sure is everywhere this season! I have no issue with her, and found her adorable as Suzuki in You and I Are Polar Opposites. However, her performance as Kinme was far too stereotypically “anime girl” for my taste. You know the type: perky, high-pitched, a little breathy. The kind that made my mom refuse to be in the room while I was watching certain shows as a teen because she claimed the voices hurt her ears. While it would be hyperbolic for me to say that about how Suzushiro plays Kinme, she did grate on me slightly in the scenes where she gets worked up.

It really is a minor complaint, though. Wash It All Away may not be what I look for in an anime, but if you want a gently meditative series to relax to in a world that feels like it's bad news all the time, it's an excellent choice.

Wash It All Away is one of those shows that gives me a much-appreciated look into the cultural differences between Japan and America that aren't so obvious as how we speak, make art, or pay honor and tribute to Godzilla, this world's rightful lord and savior. I spent many years living in college dorms and cheap apartments, so it isn't like I am completely foreign to the concept of a laundromat or dry-cleaner, but I feel like you couldn't get away with a cozy slice-of-life show about running a dry-cleaner if it was supposed to take place in the middle of the desert mountain-range that I call home. Beyond the stronger emphasis that Japanese culture tends to put on cleanliness and maintaining strong outward appearances, there's the simple fact that so many folks in Japan don't have easy access to machine driers the way that most homes in the U.S. do. I've only personally used dry-cleaning services a handful of times in my whole life, and I've literally never once hung my clothes up on a line.

There are two main points I am trying to make. The first is that I now suddenly understand why all of my nice graphic tees end up so faded and shrunken after what seems like only a year or two. The second is that I find Wash It All Away kind of interesting simply for presenting a story where I can totally buy that our protagonist Kinme has built a sort of community hub out of her humble little dry-cleaning shop. I'm always asking for more anime that are about adults dealing with regular human problems, and I can think of few premises that are as down-to-earth as a woman who cleans other people's clothes for a living.

I mean, yeah, okay, there's the whole “amnesia” deal that the show is presumably going to deal with more directly down the line, but you'd only even really know about that by reading the summary on the Preview Guide landing page or the back of the manga volumes that the anime is adapting. Besides, I can dig the thematic connection that the show is clearly establishing in this first episode, where the clothes that people wear inevitably end up telling stories about the lives they've lived and the journeys they have taken. There's a melancholy vibe underpinning all of Kinme's enthusiastic explanations of mesh-bag protocol and proper shoe cleaning technique that makes her into a more compelling character than if she were just any average gal running any average business.

As usual, these kind of iyashikei-style anime aren't necessarily the sorts of shows I would go out of my way to watch on my own from week to week. I don't know yet if Kinme's characterization and her relationships with her friends will make for the kind of compelling storytelling that I need to hold my attention for the long term. Still, this is a lovely-looking and very pleasant show to experience, so fans of the genre will almost certainly have a good time with it.

There's always something fun about seeing a place you know lovingly recreated in animation. This anime takes place in Atami, a beach resort city of around 35,000 people, an hour south of Tokyo. Yet rather than focus on the tourist hotspots, the story is focused on Kinme and her one-man clothes-cleaning operation.

This first episode is all about showing Kinme's day-to-day life. We see her exercise before work, interact with her various customers, and even invite her landlady for a cup of tea. Through all these, we can see not only how she does her job but that it is a driving obsession for her. When seeing the local firework festival happening after already closing up shop for the night, she decides to put in an extra bit of work while listening to the explosions. Also, when she notices a stain on a shirt or a scuffed shoe, she can't resist fixing the issue—even doing it without asking the client in the latter case.

Yet, while it's interesting to see all the technical ins-and-outs of how Kinme does her job, there's more to this episode than just that—and it all comes down to a single line of dialogue. When a client offhandedly mentions that Kinme loves doing laundry, her response is “It's the one thing I didn't forget, after all.”

Now this is one hell of a line to drop. On one hand, it could be metaphorical—that she left her old life and family behind, and the cleaning skills she learned back then are the only part of that time she chooses to remember. On the other hand, it could be literal, implying that Kinme has amnesia, brain damage, or something similar.

In the latter case, perhaps Kinme's first meeting with Ishimochi is anything but. Maybe they knew each other before her memory loss—maybe they went to the same school. The same could be said for any of her various clients. Perhaps they all know more about Kinme than she knows about herself?

On a meta level, that one line makes you put every scene before and after under a microscope, looking for secret meanings even as she performs mundane, everyday work. It's a cool little way of keeping the viewer's attention, even if they don't really care about how their clothes get professionally cleaned.

All in all, it's an interesting little episode—and I'll likely come back next week to see if we get any more on Kinme and her situation.

I would accuse series protagonist Wakana Kinme of being way too invested in laundry, but my mother is the same way – she just loves doing laundry and ironing. And really, we need people that fond of it, because there are also people like me who despise it. Laundry is a miracle – there's always more. And maybe for Kinme, the miracle of laundry is something else as well, because her dedication to it does seem just a bit off even as this episode cheerily meanders through her day.

The short version of this review is that Wash It All Away is gorgeous and has very little evident plot in its first episode. The art and animation lovingly detail how Kinme does her job, the way she cheerily interacts with customers, and how seamlessly she fits into the greater Atami landscape, managing to show off her beauty without resorting to objectifying her – the one fanservice shot of her cleavage is from the perspective of a teenage boy. Her customers seem to adore her, and she clearly feels the same way about them. It's like a laundry pastoral, filled with lush landscapes in rich colors and the gentle air of peaceful living. But it also isn't very interesting.

I do know from the manga that there is a bit more to the plot than we're presented with here, but if we're weighing things just on this episode, it's most likely to appeal to strict iyashikei fans. And honestly, if you just like watching the peaceful progression of a day wherein an attractive young woman interacts with locals, irons, and explains her laundering methods, this is going to make you very happy. And there is something nice about seeing how much delight Kinme takes in her job. Does she take it too far at time? Absolutely; the scene where she practically accosts a teenage boy to fix his scuffed shoe is a bit much. Yes, he's pleased at the end, but it's hard to deny that it wasn't the best thing she could have done, especially since she doesn't even ask him for permission.

The shoe scene may be the most significant indicator that there's something else going on with Kinme. Why is she so obsessed with maintaining garments to the point where she'd pull something like pouncing on a high schooler to fix his shoe? There's loving your job, and then there's obsession, and Kinme is bordering on the latter. It's also unclear if she got all blushy and fluster around the boy strictly because of his scuffed shoe or for some other reason. Either is an issue, but each is a separate one. In any event, much as I love the visuals, I don't see myself returning to this show. But if you enjoy slow-paced, peaceful tales, I suspect you'll feel differently.