Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
American TV viewers have long had an obsession with baking. From the cutthroat ovens of competitive shows like Cake Boss to the warm embrace of The Great British Bake Off, audiences love the process of creating delicious treats. But few of these shows have effectively captured the spark that the subject deserves, the joyous sensation of biting into a souffle or licking the cream off an eclair. None, that is, until Netflix’s new original series, Kantaro: The Sweet Toothed Salaryman.
Based on the comic of the same name, the show follows Kantaro, a salesman at a publishing company who is consumed by an obsessed with sweets. Obsession might actually be an understatement: From his first day at the company, Kantaro organizes his work schedule around which sweets shops he can visit in between sales trips, and optimizes his job performance accordingly. (Though Kantaro claims to take joy in his bookselling, from one angle the show appears to be an indictment of the way work crowds out all other interests from the life of the salaryman.) Kantaro has a sweet tooth but he’s not particularly discerning when it comes to which sweets he likes—one shop he visits specializes in chestnut-based confections, another focuses on painstakingly made chocolates, and a third gives him pudding. He then writes his trips up an anonymously-published blog, Sweets Knight.
Each episode is just over 20 minutes long, a quick snack compared to the rest of Netflix’s gluttonous streaming offerings. Without the need to fill 45 minutes of run time, each episode only needs to fill out a single plot. One of Kantaro’s coworkers is stuck thinking about his past baseball career and needs to be set straight. Another is given the opportunity to redirect her path in life. A third puts aside his competitive nature and strict gym habit to discover his own love of sweets. (Fans of Netflix’s other Japanese imports might recognize this actor, Kentaro, from his role on the Terrace House panel.) In the most personal episode of the series, Kantaro’s dentist mother comes for a surprise visit, complete with flashbacks that evoke a more lighthearted, version of Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Like Willy Wonka, Kantaro approaches its sweets with a sense of glee that’s almost edible from the other side of a screen: The real reason to watch the show is, of course, the desserts. Each time Kantaro manages to get his hands on a new treat, the show segues into a lush, lovingly shot scene of his fantasy sweets dreamscape, or Sweets Heaven. These sequences are full of slow, deliberate camerawork, hazy lighting, and mouth-watering expanses of peaches, cream, and chocolates, looking like something straight out of Hannibal. (In fact, the opening shot of Kantaro‘s title sequence is eerily evocative of the opening shot of Hannibal‘s.) Sometimes Kantaro finds himself on a rocket, sometimes on a plane, sometimes emerging from two halves of an enormous, divine stone fruit.
The trippiness isn’t the only thing Kantaro shares with Hannibal. The show is besotted with sweets (each of the shops Kantaro visits is a real place, which the show prominently plugs in the credits of the episodes), but each time a character enters Sweets Heaven, they’re consumed in ecstasy. It’s undeniable: They look exactly like they’re having an orgasm. As Kantaro, Matsuya Onoe takes a stoic character and imbues him with a sense of delight, and an impish, unabashed, bizarre sexuality. The pursuit of sweet treats can coexist with divergently expressed erotic impulses, hypercompetence and pride in one’s work, all in the same person. As Kantaro tells one of his coworkers during a motivational, sugar-fueled speech, “Sometimes it’s important to be kind and sweet to yourself, too.”
Eric Thurm’s writing also appears in GQ, Esquire, Real Life, and eventually in a book about board games he is writing for the NYU Press and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also the founder, producer, and host of Drunk Education, a comedic-academic event series that has absolutely nothing to do with TED.
