Wash It All Away Volume 1 Review

It’s so far, so good for Square Enix and their new manga debuts this year, and that trend looks set to continue with this new title: Wash It All Away. Does the first volume delight? Let’s take a closer look!

The story takes place in the seaside resort town of Atami, where the protagonist, Wakane Kinme, has been running a laundry service called Kinme Cleaning for the last two years. Thanks to Wakane’s dedication to her craft as well as offering a delivery and pick-up service, she’s become a hit among the locals, and her store is always busy with customers.

While Wakane’s days are filled with the joys of revitalising her customers’ precious items and the memories they contain, when it comes to her own life, our heroine has no memories before starting the store two years ago. All she could remember was how to do her job, something she had clearly spent a great deal of time working toward, given the certificate of qualification hanging proudly inside the store. Still, there’s always something happening in Atami, so Wakane simply works hard every day without dwelling on the past.

On the back cover for this release, it’s described as “A charming slice-of-life story that soothes the chaos of the modern world”, which I think is a fairly apt way of selling it. In many ways, this first volume feels like a collection of short stories, each one revolving around new clients who come to Wakane with a request. These include Kyushi, whose mother runs an inn with a hot spring that Wakane frequents, and the enthusiastic young girl Nairo, who is enthralled by Wakane’s work and wants to someday follow in her footsteps…?

As we watch over Wakane’s everyday life, the characters we meet reappear, and we get to see how there are some surprising connections between them. This, in turn, brings the town of Atami to life and gives it a lively atmosphere, while offering a sense of familiarity at the same time. As Wakane visits more and more places for her daily deliveries, slowly but surely, you gain an image of how the town is laid out.

Of course, this is helped greatly by mangaka Mitsuru Hattori’s attractive artwork. Some of you may recognise Hattori for having worked with NISIOISIN on Imperfect Girl, or for his previous long-running series Sankarea: Undying Love (which also has an anime). This is a very different tone to both of those, but Hattori captures it wonderfully with large panels and plenty of attention to detail when it comes to drawing the backgrounds and the expressions of the cast.

The art is especially important when it comes to showing Wakane’s work, where she’s actively cleaning or fixing up items, and there needs to be a very visible difference between the start and end, which is delivered! And the chapters where Nairo is introduced are particularly great for these since Wakane walks her through the cleaning process step-by-step.

Wash It All Away is complete in Japan with ten volumes, and while I certainly wouldn’t complain about ten more releases exactly like this, it seems that Wakane’s missing memories will become a bigger part of the storyline over time. She’s a character who likes to keep up appearances, not even wanting her customers to catch her off-guard wandering around town and enjoying local delicacies from the bakery. She’s a professional, but also a little dorky and while she acts like the loss of her memories doesn’t bother her, there are a few scenes in this first book that suggest she actually is upset about it. Either way, she proves an interesting lead and I’m looking forward to watching more of her story unfold in future instalments.

As mentioned earlier, Wash it All Away comes to the West thanks to Square Enix Manga and has been translated by Sawa Matsueda Savage with lettering by Adnazeer Macalangcom. The release reads well and comes packed with extras in the form of colour pages and “pocket-sized notes” between chapters, which offer more detail on how Kinme Cleaning is run and the kind of cleaning products Wakane uses. There are also some translation notes as well as a specific section for “art translation notes”, which are for signs and so on that the team didn’t want to retouch, since it would take away from Hattori’s original artwork.

Wash It All Away is on a bi-monthly release schedule in English with Volume 2 set for a release in June, #3 in August, #4 in October and #5 in December, which will get us halfway through the series in less than a year! Impressive work as always from this publisher (plus being a finished series must help significantly with scheduling!).

Overall, Wash It All Away is off to a charming start. Wakane is a likeable heroine living in a quaint town that is brought to life beautifully by Mitsuru Hattori. With a hint of mystery among the cheerful chapters showcased here, I’m looking forward to seeing what the series has in store for us going forward!

A free preview can be read on the Square Enix Manga website here.

Our review copy from Square Enix Manga was supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).

©2018 Mitsuru Hattori / SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD