This week, Chizuru explained herself. Satisfying as that was, I want to focus on the two important prongs of Chizuru’s state of mind: that she would be trampling on Ruka’s feelings and that she has acted unprofessionally. What’s notable, to me, is that these ideas basically do not exist before a certain point in the manga.
It may be time to man up, but the person who put Chizuru in this position in the first place… is Miyajima himself.
What was there before: Chizuru’s jealousy
Chizuru has long been jealous of Kazuya and Ruka’s relationship. She distanced herself from him after telling him to go out with Ruka. She distanced herself again when she thought he slept with Ruka, and then she did it again when Ruka tried it again. We have seen her, more than once, looking on as Ruka hangs over Kazuya (186). Chizuru has all but admitted she desires that kind of closeness, speaking Kazuya’s name without honorifics to herself (144), just as Ruka had done in front of her. Moreover, the idea that Ruka can do what Chizuru only wishes she could–both with Kazuya and in a vacuum–makes a lot of sense. Chizuru has long struggled with expressing her feelings.
But the Paradise Arc introduces two new dimensions to Chizuru’s struggle that didn’t exist before.
Ruka’s sudden guilt trip
Ruka laid the guilt thick to try to get Chizuru to back off. (187)
Ruka had long tried to insert herself between Kazuya and Chizuru, such as with the movie or with tagging along on New Year’s, but back then, she would only insist that she was Kazuya’s girlfriend and that Chizuru, as a rental, should back off.
But this time it’s different. She explicitly brings up that she’s Kazuya’s (provisional) girlfriend because of Chizuru. Not just before the trip but in their confrontation in the bathroom, after Chizuru kissed him. Call this a desperate ploy or the tactic of a girl who has no other moves left, but it’s notable that Ruka’s new angle gets to Chizuru in a way that the second condom bluff did not. It is explicitly one reason why Chizuru hesitates to answer Kazuya’s feelings or to hear him out after coming back from Hawaiians.
Mami’s repeated question: you’re not playing favorites, are you?
Mami accuses Chizuru of playing favorites. (195)
Similarly, Mami repeatedly pressed Chizuru on the question of whether she was going too far as a rental girlfriend. It was easy, at the time, too look at these questions as asking whether Chizuru had feelings for him. Indeed, Mami does ask about that, but she makes the point that Chizuru could “hurt [her] credibility as a rental girlfriend” by continuing to go above and beyond for Kazuya’s sake like this.
Chizuru once grappled with the idea of being unprofessional with Kazuya before, when she wept with him on the cheer-up date. But Mami would continue to press this angle, in 210 about the ring, and then appealing to Chizuru’s sense of decorum to ask her to go along with coming clean to Nagomi if hired to do so in 214. Finally, Chizuru’s veil of professionalism would be what angers her so much in 230.
Paradise brought Chizuru’s enemies together to pressure her to accept the facts
In their own ways, Ruka and Mami have pressured Chizuru into accepting the truth that she has always suppressed: that she never really wanted Kazuya to date Ruka and that everything she did was beyond professional. It is a reckoning for Chizuru. One she did to distance herself, or perhaps for his sake; the other was partly for his sake and partly to sate her appetite for companionship and affection, a hunger she could never fully satisfy this way.
And Paradise was what brought her there, brought her to this point. In this way, I feel it falls short: while there’s an underlying tension between Chizuru’s wall of professionalism and her personal desires, it’s not an interesting angle to say that she feels guilty or exposed for having breached this professional wall so much for him, and at best it lets her see that she’s already gone this far and there’s no reason to cling to it any longer, but that’s something that could’ve been dealt with after the cheer-up date.
Similarly, the angle about potentially hurting Ruka while taking Kazuya selfishly for herself is not very interesting, either, at least not from the angle about hurting Ruka. Ruka and Chizuru are not friends; what’s stopping her is one part altruism and one part hesitation to confront her own feelings. There’s nothing intellectually interesting or emotionally compelling there. At best, it’s another excuse–and if they’re both excuses, I’d actually prefer that rather than take this Ruka issue at face value.
Ultimately this seems to lead toward Chizuru coming to terms with her desires and allowing herself to embrace them. That’s great, but this indirect way of getting there, with angles that cropped up nearly out of nowhere, feels like Miyajima forcing it to set up his preferred image of this next storyline: Kazuya and Chizuru’s reconciliation. And that’s a shame because the author forcing the story to bend toward a desired result like this often feels lacking. Kiss aside, none of this was what the audience really wanted to see, and frankly, it’s a surprise to me that either of those angles from Ruka or Mami made any impact whatsoever. Chizuru hesitating because she doesn’t understand her feelings? Sure. I 100% buy that, but Miyajima seems to want us to take these excuses involving Ruka and Mami seriously, based on how often Ruka and Mami hammered them. That I just can’t get behind.
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