What's It About?

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 has no knowledge of her own past, her cleaning services safeguard memories imbued in customers' precious items.

Wash It All Away has story and art by Mitsuru Hattori, with English translation by Sawa Matsueda Savage and lettering by Adnazeer Macalangcon. Published by Square Enix Manga & Books (April 22, 2025). Rated OT.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

It's a bit of a surprise to realize that Wash It All Away comes from the same creator as Sankarea – you can't get much farther from a zombie story than one about cleaning. But despite that surface difference, both series actually share a sense of heartfelt yearning and a desire to find a way to be at peace. For Rea, it was escaping her family by becoming undead. For Wakane Kinme, it's being the absolute best laundress she can be, even if she can't remember anything past two years ago. Both young women share an outlook that you have to find happiness as best you can, and there's something really lovely about that.

Still, this is almost strictly a story for those looking for peaceful slice-of-life tales. Kinme's life fully revolves around her laundry business, and every chapter engages with her work and work ethic in some way. Even the chapter about her taking a day off is still about the way her laundry runs her life, but don't get the wrong idea: if her job is her life, it's because she wants it that way. There's a sense that Kinme finds deep solace and satisfaction in solving people's laundry-related problems, in finding just the best way to clean something precious or to remove a deep-set stain. Is it a way for her to avoid thinking about her memory loss? I think there's a real possibility of that, especially given the end of her day off chapter, when she sits on her roof and has a vision of a battered version of her (or someone who looks just like her) sitting beside her. Perhaps Kinme simply doesn't want to remember her time before, and when she washes someone's laundry, she's also washing away any bad feelings or past memories that she doesn't want to have anymore.

Mitsuru Hattori's art is both simple and busy, expertly conveying the town Kinme lives in (Atami) as both a residential area and a popular tourist destination. Kinme herself sort of glides through it, interacting with people while still maintaining a bit of a wall around herself, although she doesn't seem to be aware that she's doing so. Nairo, a very enthusiastic little girl, comes closest to breaking through her barrier, more so even than a customer who goes out of her way to interact with Kinme on a social level, but Kinme's still always holding something back. A large part of the appeal of this volume outside the catharsis of a cozy slice-of-life story is figuring out what it is that Kinme has forgotten and how that might affect her present life.

I was leery going into this book because I can think of only one chore I dislike more than laundry. (Doing dishes.) But while this is about cleaning clothes, it's more about the metaphor that laundry gives Kinme for her life. It's soft and sweet, like a blanket left to dry in the sun.

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