Kiyo lacks the ambition to become a maiko, says one of the house mothers, sadly, but as Kiyo is given a warning about her future, she is too distracted to pay it much mind. It is much more wholesome than that and has the gentle touch of a modern-day fairytale. Yet this isn’t a story of thwarted potential, or crumbling dreams. The friends’ pact to train together appears to be doomed.
Kiyo, meanwhile, dances out of step, has two left feet, can only drum on an off-beat and lacks the skills she needs to progress, though she is as cheerful as she is clumsy. Clearly, when it comes to the traditional arts of the maiko, she has the potential to become one of the best. Sumire is a natural and embraces life as a trainee, despite her father’s opposition to the idea. We join them as they adjust to life in the maiko house, where relationships are formed around the idea of a family unit – there are mothers, sisters and brothers – though nobody is actually related.
It prompts them to leave school and move to Kyoto to train to be among their ranks. It tells the story of Kiyo and her best friend, Sumire, two 16-year-old girls who leave their home city of Aomori after seeing maiko, or apprentice geishas, in the street on a school trip. The Makanai is quite lovely, and unlike anything else I have seen lately. The series is adapted from a popular Japanese manga and its showrunner is the director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or for Shoplifters in 2018. There is, though it requires a bit of digging it would be a shame if the gorgeous nine-parter The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House gets passed over. W ith a Netflix Top 10 that, in the UK at least, features Ginny & Georgia, Vikings: Valhalla and Emily in Paris, you might be forgiven for wondering if there is much left on the streaming platform that isn’t either totally daft or about serial killers.
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