‘Burn the House Down’ Ending Explained: Who Burned the Mitarai’s House?

Welcome to the ending explained for Burn the House Down, a new drama TV series releasing on Netflix this week. The series is an adaptation of the manga of the same name, written and illustrated by Moyashi Fujisawa. Yuichiro Hirakawa directs the series and stars Mei Nagano, Kyoka Suzuki, Asuka Kudo, Taishi Nakagawa, and Yuri Tsunematsu. The series tells a story of revenge as a young woman named Anzu begins to work for the woman who ruined her family thirteen years ago. The series joins the other several manga/anime adaptations that Netflix has been cooking up for a while.

Burn the House Down is an example of the kind of manga and anime adaptations we need. Netflix is pushing hard for manga adaptations of stories that are certainly more out there.

For example, we will have a One Piece adaptation in the coming months, which looks like a hard translation from the page to the screen. The world is just too outlandish and cartoony to feel real in a live-action version. Burn the House Down doesn’t have that issue because the story is already grounded in reality. Even something like Alice in Wonderland, while having genre elements, could stand scrutiny in an adaptation. We need more like this one and less like Cowboy Bebop.

The following paragraphs contain spoilers for Burn the House Down. Read at your own risk.

How Is Anzu Going To Find The Truth About The Fire?

Burn the House Down is a story dealing with the consequences of one event. The titular fire burned the house down. We get introduced to Anzu, a young woman who was a fire victim when she was younger.

Her house and everything in it just burned down. This led to their parents’ divorce, Anzu, and her younger sister Yuzu, were left alone with their mother, Satsuki. Satsuki is blamed for the fire, and she accepts the guilt as she is unsure if she left the stove on or off. It doesn’t matter anyway. The house is gone, and so is her marriage.

Anzu later finds out that her mother’s best friend, a woman named Makiko, married her father and brought their children with her. The series then focuses on Anzu getting closer to Makiko, because she believes she was the one who started the fire. Anzu always found Makiko a bit strange because it was clear that she wanted to be like her mother.

Then, Anzu, her sister, and her mother were living in luxury thanks to the fortune of her parents and also thanks to the fact that her father is basically the owner of an important hospital.

Anzu and her sister are working small jobs and living in poverty. Their mother has lost her memory of the event, and everything seems to be going terribly. She decides to take action, though, and to clear her mother’s name, Anzu enters Makiko’s service as a housekeeper.

Later, as the series progresses, Anzu becomes Makiko’s manager, as the old woman is building a career as an influencer. Little by little, Anzu begins to extract clues that place Makiko at the place of the incident, pointing her as the true responsible for the fire.

We also get to know Makiko’s sons, Kiichi, and Shinji. Both were childhood friends of Anzu and Yuzu, but they changed after Makiko married Anzu’s father. Kiichi became a reclusive person, and Shinji focused his entire energy on becoming a doctor.

We start learning bits and pieces of their stories and learn that they are tired of the fake life their mother has constructed around herself. We learn that Shinji used to go to Anzu’s house when he was a kid, and he spent a lot of time with their mother, as she made him feel safe in ways his mother never did.

Who Burned The Mitarai’s House?

As the series progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Makiko just burned down the house as part of her plan to take away everything from Satsuki, including his husband and money.

Makiko creates an entirely fake persona that she sells online, and Anzu uses this to trap her in her own lies. Anzu discovers that Makiko is in possession of a sweater that belonged to her mother. There was video footage of someone going out of the house the day of the fire using that sweater, which means that Makiko was in the house when no one else was. She must be responsible.

However, things take a turn when Makiko is trapped in her lies. The police open the case once more thanks to the new evidence provided, and their main suspect is Makiko. However, their investigation also leads them to find something off about Kiichi’s involvement.

They have witnesses who saw Kiichi near the house on the day of the fire. Kiichi, who has fallen in love with Anzu, decides to give himself to the police. Even when his mother tries to blame her, the police see that the evidence matches much more closely with Kiichi being the actual perpetrator.

Anzu and Yuzu go to Makiko’s house and confront her. There, she reveals the truth about the sweater. She explains how she took it and some other of Satsuki’s accessories. She did it to go well-dressed to a fan club meeting.

She later returned to the house to put everything back but was discovered by a young Yuzu. Makiko panicked and returned to his own, where she realized she had forgotten to return the sweater. After her confession, she accidentally burns the house’s table, and as they try to put the fire down, Shinji appears, putting the fire out with his body.

A crying Shinji reveals that he, not his mother, not his brother, is the one who started the fire that day. He saw Satsuki’s sweater in his house and went to Satsuki’s to return it. There he was, there was curry in the kitchen, and he tried to heat it up using the stove.

One thing led to another, and Shinji left the house burning, expecting someone to notice and put it down. The revelation breaks both sisters’ hearts, and Anzu begs Shinji to apologize to her mother, who must know she wasn’t responsible for the fire thirteen years ago.

The series ends with Shinji revealing to Satsuki he was responsible for the fire. Satuski forgives him, as too much time has passed. Makiko and Anzu’s father divorce, Yuzu finds a job in marketing, and Shinji keeps studying to become the best doctor he can be and work under his stepfather’s command at the hospital. Meanwhile, Anzu declares her love for Kiichi and decides to live together and help one another achieve their dreams.