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As a slice-of-life manga (and soon anime series on Crunchyroll), sometimes it feels like each volume of Wash It All Away can have different sorts of focuses as we watch Wakana Kinme go about her life. Sometimes, it’s about establishing Atami and its residents. Wakana’s relationships with people can come up. There can even be teases about her past. With volume 5 of the Wash It All Away manga, it instead feels like the focus this time is on different kinds of artistry and craftmanship, whether it be Wakana’s cleaning techniques or more traditional forms of art.
Editor’s Note: There are spoilers for situations in the fifth volume of the Wash It All Away manga below.
Basically, much of volume 5 of Wash It All Away is dealing with Wakana Kinme and new friend and Atami resident Remy Shiira. Remy is a foreigner who’s moved back to the region, but her grandparents lived in Japan. She’s an artist, with us seeing her both paint and open a pottery studio in the town. So the initial connections between her and Wakana form due to a mutual appreciation for each others’ talents.
Things start with the two young women appreciating different forms of talent. Wakana happens upon Remy when the latter is painting near a tent. She’s watching her work on landscapes and, initially, it seems like Remy is a visitor who doesn’t know the language. When Remy camping leads to a small issue, Wakana offers Kinme Cleaning’s backyard as a temporary spot and notices that Remy’s clothing and fabrics got damaged when she cleaned them on her own. As she uses color theory to repair one item that faded, it catches Remy’s attention. The two then bond over that.
From there, we get a closer look at pottery. Remy’s Japanese grandfather was a potter and passed the joy of the creative process down to her. When Wakana comes to the new studio, we see Remy teach her the coil building method to create her own bowl. That’s when we also learn Remy’s grandparents had a holiday home there. When the two later go sightseeing together at Atami castle, this leads them to explore exhibits tied to that same sort of art.
But most interesting is how Wakana’s own talents as craftsperson come into play at the end of the fifth volume of Wash It All Away. In the fourth volume, we see her find a stuffed animal that had been brought in for cleaning by someone with the last name of Mutsu. However, while Wakana is able clean the plush rabbit, she’s never able to find its original home. At the end of this volume, that story gets a proper resolution. But before that even happens, we see how intelligent and aware Wakana is as an artisan. She recognizes how important all elements of a finished, cleaned product is, including things like familiar scents. So it’s almost like aromatherapy is put into play when she puts on a finishing touch that helps that lil’ buddy get home.
Throughout Wash It All Away, the manga seems to establish how detailed the cleaning process is, and volume 5 sort of compares Wakana Kinme to an artist with the care she puts into her work. We see her flat out use artistic techniques to deal with fading at one point. Then, after watching her learn about pottery and the methods to put together a detailed and aesthetically pleasing piece, we get to see her use the power of certain scents to create the same sort of ambiance around a completed cleaning assignment.
Volume 5 of Wash It All Away is available now, and Square Enix will eventually release volume 6.
