It's little secret that traditionally men who did household chores, cooked, or took care of the kids got plenty of funny looks from their friends at the office. Even in that realm Japan is a rather extreme example; it's been said that it wasn't until the late 1980's manga Cooking Papa that the domestic husband got anything in the way public acceptance. But while the situation is far from ideal today, the mainstream popularity of works like Usagi Drop, as well as a chapter of Cooking Papa where the titular father comes out to his coworkers as the housekeeper and cooker, are an indicator that the times are changing. Even works like Barakamon and Poco's Udon World are tackling issues of parenthood, although like with Usagi Drop there seems to be an odd resistance to having a biological father-child pair. Sweetness & Lighting is such a work, and with it we finally get not just a single father taking care of his biological preschool-age child, with both the seriousness of imparting maturity as a parent and the lighthearted moments of mutual understanding as pals. It also tackles this all through the lens of learning to cook, which serves both as a great framing device for moral lessons as well as a nucleating point, a relaxing process which we are privileged to drop in on.
Originally going into the first episode, watching Inuzuka Kouhei and his daughter Tsumugi cooking at one of Kouhei's students Kotori's family restaurant after hours, I wasn't aware that this was going to be the recurring structure of each episode, nor did I realize the show would give full lessons on basic cooking techniques and simple at-home recipes. Of course I'm more than happy to have all that, but I was worried at first that this meal-of-the-week style was going to reduce every episode to a different canned lesson, an unusual situation to be solved through cooking in an abstract and contrived way. I suppose I can't say that the structure was much different than I had feared, but I guess I had presupposed that the lessons would be trite. And to the contrary, Sweetness & Lightning has a subtle understanding of what the parent-child dynamic is like. The time Kouhei spends goofing off with Tsumugi, or asking her questions about school and her favorite TV shows, or even just getting her pumped up for trying new food, is rarely overstated or dramatized; it's simply there for us to see.
A lot of credit goes to Endou Rina's performance as Tsumugi, as emotive and starry-eyed as we would expect a child to be. She has had two previous roles as children, once in Barakamon and once as the lead in Tabi Machi Late Show, but Tsumugi is easily her best performance to date. She mispronounces “dad” by leaving out an elongated vowel, just as any beginning student of Japanese would, and when she says “yeah!” it sounds like the excited yipping of a puppy. Just as impressive are her restrained but dejected verbal notes when Kouhei scolds her or she feels unsatisfied. The combination of her expressive facial features and Endou's voice evokes the feeling of a kid, albeit the long-haired bouncing-off-the-walls kid we never really had.
One episode stands out most of all to me, and it seems to be the episode with little precedent in either anime and live TV. Tsumugi leaves the house to go shopping for her bedridden father, but when Kouhei finds her missing he gets scared and goes looking for her. The moment he sees her, we get a shot of his face, as it changes from anxiety to relief and instantly into anger, and he lashes out at her for going off on her own. The view of a father so drained of energy falling into anger as the pressure comes off was just as visceral as Tsumugi's confusion in seeing her father while doing him a favor only to have him start yelling and telling you that what you did was wrong. Their reconciliation isn't abnormal either; he apologizes, she cries, they hug, they go and make food. But we can tell that both of them learned a lesson, and that even if this were to happen again they would be able to understand each other's position a little bit better.
In fact, for as young as Tsumugi is and for how Kouhei acts as her father, guardian, and provider, a lot of the show is about how to treat children as maturing adults, and in a way that even a four-year-old could understand. Whenever they go to make food at Kotori's restaurant, Kouhei gives her a job appropriate for her age, without putting pressure on her to actually accomplish rather than just to learn. The recurring food preparation always wraps up the episode, as everyone gets together to eat the food they made together, and Tsumugi's joy in eating together has both the reminiscence of eating meals with her dead mother and Kouhei, and the wonder that comes with doing something completely unfamiliar, of being part of creating something entirely new. It allows Tsumugi to be a child who grows and develops, even as the same sorts of things happen every episode and no real plot evolves.
The other figure deserving praise is of course Kouhei himself. The cuts between scenes of him with Tsumugi, using casual or even childish language and dealing with personal day-to-day issues, are interspersed with him as a teacher, as a professional tasked with a job and who is charged with disciplining students in a much different and more detached manner than when he disciplines Tsumugi. Even with Kotori who he regularly cooks with, there is a clear professional distance maintained, and both parties use formal language and classic Japanese indirect expressions. In some sense, Kotori is allowed to see and interact with both parts of his life, once as a student who receives his teachings, once as the proprietor and head chef who leads Kouhei and Tsumugi along. But we see little change from her depending on the environment, and overall she's more of a static figure who catalyzes this new dimension to Kouhei and Tsumugi's relationship. Ultimately it's through Kouhei that we experience these lives and relationships themselves, and over the course of the show his sympathy for Tsumugi develop in parallel with his cooking skills, while his ability to cook after hours with Kotori has presumably developed his sympathy for his students.
Maybe it's just a bonus past that point, but the food scenes were simply fun to watch in their own right. In the season they aired, there was heavy contrast between Food Wars! The Second Plate, where everyone's technical prowess was top level as a matter of course, and Sweetness & Lightning, where Kouhei and Tsumugi had to keep proper knife technique in mind just to finish cutting a single carrot. The dishes are so simple every step of the process can show up on screen, and with enough time for Tsumugi to do a little dance praying for their success. At the end of the week of the two shows, it was Sweetness & Lightning that left me hungry, and often times if I hadn't eaten before watching the episode I would have to go back later and rewatch, just to appreciate how much more the show was.