Comedy, soap opera, and coming-of-age romance - how Miyajima is caught between three concepts of what Rent-A-Girlfriend is (Ch. 242)

This week, Chizuru came out with her most blatant act of flirtation yet, promising Kazuya that she’d give it all she had to find him an answer and implicitly saying that she wouldn’t allow it to take long. This is tantamount to saying that she is almost there, and the content of the chapter bolsters this argument. They have hung out together for at least the second time (after their time at Saizeriya) in a completely casual way. They enjoyed each other’s company without further pretenses or objectives behind their time together.

She’s givin’ it all she’s got, cap’n!

But all this leads us to believe that what has kept Chizuru from reaching this point is no great misconception about love or a hitherto unknown interest in it. She hasn’t articulated any kind of hangup about what love really is (which would’ve been understandable but also deeply stupid, along the lines of many a simpler romcom). What it takes her to get to this point is simply the luxury of spending more time with Kazuya and getting to see how a closer relationship with him feels.

All in all, I can’t complain about that in a vacuum. That’s pretty real, and it’s nice not to have some distracting angle, some false concept of what’s holding her back, that would act as a set of quest objectives for Chizuru to check off before she understands what love really is.

On the other hand, I would not blame anyone for feeling that such a conclusion is anticlimactic. We went through all this just to realize that all Chizuru really needed to do was spend more time with Kazuya and work through her hesitations? That’s it?

In the end, I think this sense that something is a little bit wanting can be better understood through the innate tension that exists within Rent-A-Girlfriend–the tension between its cringe comedy, its occasional lapses into soap opera, and the coming-of-age romance between Kazuya and Chizuru that gets interrupted more often than not for the other two.

A steady diet of cringe

This week Kazuya gave us another play-by-play of how to carry out a simple plan to get closer to Chizuru.

Like it or not, Rent-A-Girlfriend is (very nearly) first and foremost a cringe comedy. Kazuya’s general personality, overreacting and overthinking, makes it an ever-present element in the story. Even this chapter, we get the blow-by-blow rundown of Kazuya’s improvized attempt to find a way to hang out with Chizuru that she won’t find repulsive, with Kazuya worrying about it every step of the way. In some ways, this is rather unique to Rent-A-Girlfriend, as it makes every chapter significantly wordier than other peers, like A Couple of Cuckoos. We stay tightly locked to Kazuya’s state of mind at all times, feeling almost all of his ups and downs and only rarely venturing into other characters’ heads when it suits the story.

But aside from cringe comedy not being everybody’s cup of tea, there is a secondary effect: Chizuru is, in large part, a mystery for Kazuya to unravel. We rarely get insight into her state of mind directly, and Kazuya spends a great deal of effort (and narration) trying to figure out how she feels and what she wants. In another story, that might not matter that much, but here, it is of great consequence: Chizuru’s entire side of this coming-of-age romance is largely inferred.

Who’s story is this? It’s Chizuru’s!

From the moment Chizuru summoned her courage and invited Kazuya to the batting cages, things have never been the same. (56)

Since chapter 53 at least, there’s been a major shift in the story. Kazuya decided he was really in love with Chizuru and would forget about being with Mami or even Ruka to stand by her side. In many ways, this completes the narrative arc we started with in chapter 1, in which Kazuya was heartbroken only to meet Chizuru, seemingly the perfect girlfriend who shows him compassion like no one else ever would. In this way she is like no one else he has ever met,a girl who stirs him to want to be different and change, instead of someone he is merely infatuated with (19).

But after that point, the focus shifts greatly to Chizuru, with her acting dream becoming a more prominent point, followed by the revelations about her family background and past. We get a sense of what she is struggling with–loss, disconnection, the need to be strong on her own because she has no one else left. And with that, Chizuru’s path of growth, and the overall direction of the story, takes shape, with Kazuya looking to support her and Chizuru slowly but surely letting him deeper and deeper into her life and her heart.

That being said, you would be right to wonder–does Chizuru have any thoughts on this? Has being around Kazuya taught her something? Does she have a materially different attitude about life and love and connections and being real with other people now? And the answer is… we don’t know. We only get answers to what Chizuru thinks when she tells Kazuya, and… they’ve had a lot to talk about besides that. I once thought something like this would become important after Chizuru decided not to tell Sayuri the truth, that Chizuru had absorbed something about Sayuri’s arguments about truth and lies (151), but in the end, it’s hard to say how much intent she had. Locked as we are to Kazuya’s point of view most of the time, we don’t get a clear idea of Chizuru’s changing attitude. Her coming-of-age story has to be seen from the outside, and in the end, I think it would be a fair reading to say she has simply learned to open her heart, and that’s all there is. Good for her, but a memorable lesson that is not.

Soap opera to grind it all to a halt, and for what?

I’m not one to look down on coming-of-age romance with a solid pair. After all, Kazuya and Chizuru complement each other like peanut butter and jelly, but time and again we see that what has stopped Kazuya and Chizuru from exploring their feelings and getting closer isn’t some kind of intrinsic hangup Chizuru has–or at least, that’s not the main reason. Rather, it’s some kind of external force that barges in to make Chizuru retreat.

Left alone, Chizuru was exploring her feelings for Kazuya well enough. After the interrupted confession, she brought Kazuya to Umi’s party, acted like his girlfriend at dinner, and admitted to him on the walk home that she did want to be in a relationship while echoing back his words about always wanting to have someone by her side (179). At the time, that seems to be a pretty clear signal that Chizuru was seriously considering getting involved with Kazuya, and in light of her behavior since Paradise, I think it’s safe to say that what Chizuru didn’t understand was simply anxiety about the tangled situation they were in. “Why did I agree to this trip?” Knowing that it was not yet real, that she had not accepted his feelings, that she wasn’t completely sure, and that she would be doing so in front of Ruka’s face… that’s a valid question to ask. Was her heart really that confident, ahead of her brain?

Antics with Ruka have always served to force Chizuru back into her corner, to put her back in her place. Mami and her scheme at Hawaiians amped it up to another level, putting Chizuru in a crucible where she had to confront her feelings in the highest-pressure situation imaginable.

But for what? Chizuru was coming close to realizing her feelings anyway. Did that tension lead her to a materially different conclusion? I can’t see how it would’ve, so I’m forced to conclude that the tension itself, the drama, the scheming, the moves and countermoves–that was what Miyajima was here for. That’s what he wanted. Drama in and of itself.

I don’t pass judgment on soapy drama. It has its own appeal, but Miyajima generally misses an opportunity for drama to have a bigger impact. Hawaiians didn’t change the course. It just jammed up the flow of the story for a while until the dam broke and sent us on our way again.

In the end, I’m sure it will be a nice feeling to see Chizuru let go of her burdens. That seems pretty likely to happen, but will Rent-A-Girlfriend matter in the end? Will it advance the art form? Probably not much; Miyajima’s artwork may be the best contribution in this respect. The soapy drama and cringe comedy, in the end, will be forgotten. Is there anything left? Some message we should take away from all this? If it’s just the beauty of a romance based on connection, maybe that will stick with some people. Personally, I think Miyajima could be capable of more… if he chose to aspire to that.