With 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. 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. 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.
The Makanai is quite lovely, and unlike anything else I have seen lately. 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. It prompts them to leave school and move to Kyoto to train to be among their ranks. 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.
