I just finished watching the first episode of the newly airing anime series Kirei ni Shite Moraemasuka / Wash It All Away (綺麗にしてもらえますか). It is based on a manga of the same name written and illustrated by Mitsuru Hattori, which completed serialization (2017–2023) with 11 volumes in total.
This is a slice-of-life series following the daily life of Wakana Kinme as she runs her business, Kinme Cleaning, in the calm and slow-paced coastal city of Atami. Wakana is a genuinely sweet woman trying her best to provide amazing service to her customers. She seems very passionate about the job, as seen in various scenes where she inquires about the details of the clothes to ensure the best results.
This first episode focused mostly on introducing her business, her daily schedule, and her quirky personality that sometimes surfaces. For example (attached the video to this post) when she started cleaning the high school boy's shoes without him asking only to get extremely flustered afterward.
We also see glimpses of the characters who live around her and are likely to become staples of the series, such as the landlady Aji coming to collect the rent, the high school boy Ishimochi Kyuushou (who is apparently one of the main characters), and the friendly housewife Yagara Asami.
There is also a line that interested me where Wakana said, "How to clean is something I've not forgotten." I searched the synopsis online to try and understand more about it. It looks like Wakana actually lost most of her memories two years prior to the beginning of the story and is currently living what can be called a "second life" because of it.
This is likely to become a focal point of the series, and I am curious to know exactly what caused her to lose her memories. I am sure we are going to see glimpses of her past as she starts to remember, but considering the slice-of-life approach and the limited runtime of the adaptation, I do not think we will get too far with that plotline. I guess I will have to buy and read the manga to know how it ends if the story manages to hook me.
The animation quality was quite solid in this first episode and does not seem to suffer from too many obvious still frames or panning shots. It is a slice-of-life series, though, so it is not going to have heavy action anyway. We should be safe in that regard.
Overall, I can say this was a genuinely good start for the adaptation. I am curious to see where the story goes from here, so I will keep watching this weekly.
