Suzume Tachibana, a maid working at a British mansion, is forced to live in Japan for one year until the damage to her employer's mansion is repaired. While living in a small apartment, she becomes interested in Japanese food. The story follows Suzume as she discovers and tastes all sorts of food, from sweets like taiyaki and melonpan to savoury snacks like takoyaki and onigiri.

The Food Diary of Miss Maid is a perfectly pleasant show about a young woman enjoying Japanese street food and convenience store snacks under blossoming sakura trees. It involves listening to Kana Ichinose gasp over the delights of warm packaged onigiri and freshly cooked takoyaki. It's one of the better-looking anime produced by EMT Squared, perhaps because they're working in conjunction with longstanding studio Magic Bus, which has been around longer than I've been alive.

But forgive me for using it as a springboard for a different discussion, the topic being anime's strange understanding of maids in Current Year. In the opening of the episode, Suzume narrates about how maids must rise at dawn and begin their day's work cleaning, even in places others don't see. She puts on her uniform and gets to work dusting...and then the camera pulls back to show she lives in a small tatami floor apartment.

See, Suzume isn't a maid as in a woman employed by a wealthy person or family to provide services that involve cleaning and other care work to the household, Suzume is a maid as defined by modern anime and manga (which seems to be undergoing a growing maid renaissance lately), a sort of fantasy creature with an inherent drive to wear frilly black-and-white uniforms. She derives joy and fulfillment from arbitrary housework. Even while left without a master to care for, she continues this daily routine out of pure instinct. She only lives to serve. Serve who? It doesn't matter--even without someone for her to serve, she continues to go through the motions.

Yeah, if you stop and think about it for more than two seconds, it's weird, right? Except that Suzume goes to get takoyaki with her grandmother, so she clearly has some kind of human lineage. Was she conditioned into a life of indentured servitude from early childhood or something?

But The Food Diary of Miss Maid doesn't want you to think about that, it just wants you to see a young woman in a cute maid uniform trying to figure out how to eat dango. And to its credit, it does a good job of depicting that.

Anyway, the setup for this show is pretty odd. Here we have a Japanese girl constantly dressed like a maid who lived in England for most of her life, but she's now stuck in Japan, a country she barely remembers, for an entire year because her employer destroyed the family mansion with a botched rooftop pool extension while she was on paid leave for a vacation. There are plenty of questions I think we could ask about all of this: How does Suzume adapt to this apparently foreign culture so quickly, despite seemingly knowing nothing about basic things like food? Why is she wearing that maid uniform everywhere she goes?

Despite her insistence on playing the role of a Victorian maid 24/7, Suzume does have at least two other facets to her personality: She's very naive and she really likes to eat. The latter is of course a major component of this series--after her vacation gets extended by her employer hiring incompetent contractors, Suzume settles down to mark up her guidebook and eat her way through Japan's snack food landscape. In this episode, she samples taiyaki, takoyaki, dango, onigiri and Baumkuchen, and credit where it's due, they all look as incredibly tasty as I can verify they are in real life. Also remarkable is that the animation lets the food speak for itself. Yes, Suzume waxes rhapsodic about flavours and mouthfeel, but mostly the images of the food are allowed to demonstrate how amazing it is all on their own. It left me wanting some fresh takoyaki and onigiri myself, and a bit frustrated that my next opportunity to eat some is still about a month and a half away.

But while we're taking the premise of this goofy cartoon far too seriously, I have to wonder how shows like this play for the native viewers in Japan. It just seems awfully obvious and self-congratulatory, doesn't it? Don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to admit that Japanese cuisine is delicious as hell, but we're not even delving into especially fancy or unique dishes here. I do find it funny that a cooking-themed anime would work so hard to sell the glory of animated onigiri to folks who can go spend less than 200 yen at the nearest 7-Eleven for the real deal. I also did find myself wondering just when this is set, in part because there wasn't much else to do while watching, but also because Suzume calls her employer from a pay phone and her grandmother's dress looks right out of the 80s. I think there might have been a background character using a smartphone in one scene, but unlike The Invisible Man and His Wife-to-Be (which, despite clearly taking place in present-day Tokyo, somehow had some people confused about when it takes place simply because the opening features idyllic countryside shots, and which I'm still using that slightly reworded title for because "Wife-to-Be" just sounds more natural than "Soon-to-Be Wife"), there isn't much to suggest this is a current-time setting.

Again, I know I'm thinking too hard about a show that exists primarily to be cute and showcase tasty snacks. To the show's credit, it's also pretty good at selling its qualities as a more general sitcom for folks that aren't immediately taken in by the segments of the show that function as shameless advertisement work for the Japan Tourism Agency. The production values are consistently strong, which helps to sell the gentle comedy of Suzume's antics and the overall pleasantness of her misadventures. Some genuine effort is being made to establish a supporting cast that we can get invested in--Suzume's budding friendship with her standoffish neighbour is honestly quite sweet, for example, and her grandparents are just adorable.

Oh yeah, I have to mention this little oddity...

The neighbour's name is Nana Komatsu. For those of you who don't know, Nana Komatsu is the name of one of the two titular protagonists of the Shojo Beat classic Nana. It's like naming a character Motoko Kusanagi or Usagi Tsukino--even if it were an everyday name, the name itself has so much connection to the character that it automatically overshadows any other character to use it. Now, to be fair, one of the character's kanji is different, but that doesn't fix the issue. To make things worse, there's also a popular Japanese actress with the same name (ALSO spelled with different kanji), which leads to the same problem but outside of the anime sphere. The only exception where this would be okay is like with DanDaDan, where Okarun having the same name as a famous actor is a recurring plot point, but there's no sign of that yet.

While the food angle of The Food Diary of Miss Maid isn't novel enough to stand out much, Suzume herself is a bit of a nonentity so far, and the experience of watching it isn't exactly thrilling, I think this is one anime that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. I'm actually interested in watching more of it in the future, which is not how I thought things would go when I first tuned in. Maybe it's not high-priority viewing material, but I'll check in on it now and then.

By the way, I can't be the only one who feels like "Miss Maid's Food Diary" would flow a bit better as a title than "The Food Diary of Miss Maid", right?