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This is textbook Miyajima (Rent-A-Girlfriend Ch. 243)

This week, Kazuya once again found himself handling a piece of undergarments he believes to be Chizuru’s and trying desperately not to get caught doing so when it was through no fault of his own. Everything about this, from the clear chapter 40 callback to the way Kazuya’s mile-a-minute thinking intentionally distracts from deeper thinking about CHizuru’s state of mind, is Miyajima in a nutshell. These are his bread-and-butter techniques to get ideas across.

Kazuya, in a compromising position? No way!

Did you forget the panties?

It’d be easy to forget chapter 40. Up until this point, it seemed like a meaningless gag chapter. The anime didn’t even bother adapting it, but there is a long, pregnant pause there in which Chizuru seems ready to back off in deference to Ruka, something that would be easily overlooked while Ruka is jumping on Kazuya to try to figure out what he’s got in his pocket (you should be careful, Ruka: that’s one way to get saddled with a Ring of Power… or maybe Ruka has been cursed this whole time?).

Chizuru reacts coolly when Kazuya suggests he’ll take care of Ruka and that Chizuru need not be concerned. (40)

We’ve already seen that Miyajima loves these callback sequences. 218 was infamously an extended callback to chapter 1. We got the Kibe punch 2.0 as well during the whole sequence with the truth coming out, and the condom storyline was explicitly acknowledged in-universe as a repeat with a different outcome. The same goes here: back then, in 40, Chizuru hesitated to be open with her feelings, and the moment was lost. Here she delivers the tickets decisively, albeit after some pumping herself up.

I will say that overall I think 40 is a bit of a funnier chapter; it gets going with the central conceit much more quickly, and there are more wacky antics going on with trying to keep the panties from Ruka. 243 is a better chapter from a relationship development standpoint, however, and it has a much better punchline (as Ruka’s scheming leads to irritation with her actions while finding the old woman’s bra is just something to laugh at).

Pay no attention to the spaz behind the curtain

Kazuya is freaking out so hard people might not even notice Chizuru’s awkwardness for what it really is.

Kazuya freaking out about something involving Chizuru. We’ve been here many times before, but often times, it is used for a specific purpose—to distract and draw attention away from more closely examining Chizuru’s state of mind. Here, Kazuya comments on it through the lens of his fear that she’s there for the bra. A character noticing something but coming to the wrong conclusion about it is a tried-and-true tactic to control the audience’s attention and line of reasoning. It helps steer the audience through the experience to discover Chizuru’s anxiousness at the right, and most impactful, moment.

Miyajima loves this particular magic trick. He relied on it heavily in the Last Scene arc, having Kazuya jump to the conclusion that Chizuru could be confessing to him when in actuality the clues were in front of us the whole time (135), all the way back to when she was in his apartment planning the kickstarter campaign, and even going back to the flashback that started the movie arc in the first place: she was thinking about her grandfather the whole time, and she wanted to share how much all this meant to her. He even brought it out just to distract us from Chizuru’s nervous looking around as she was checking for evidence of Ruka (241), not scrutinizing Kazuya’s apartment for signs he was unworthy.

Miyajima’s storytelling is not especially subtle. He straight-up gives us what Chizuru is thinking this chapter just to make sure we got the message. This is not intended to be a mystery, but for all of his foibles in other aspects of storytelling, he relies on simple, effective techniques to send the messages he wants to send. This is Miyajima in his element: relying on the comedy of Kazuya struggling to cope with life’s unexpected challenges, a little bit of fawning over how stunning Chizuru is, a callback to show how much things have changed, and a little bit of misdirection to keep us from realizing how exactly Chizuru was feeling until the right moment. There really are few better examples in this manga of Miyajima’s style than this, and this time, we got the payoff of Chizuru practically skipping away after she gave Kazuya the tickets to boot.

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