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Fleeting glimpses of something real (Rent-A-Girlfriend ch. 248)

Chizuru Ichinose is one big, fat chicken, but the biggest chicken of them all is Reiji Miyajima because once again we get a glimpse of Chizuru’s true feelings only for the audience to enjoy while Chizuru’s actual affection for Kazuya remains hidden partly behind a wall. In this chapter, there are two moments that exemplify this.

Chizuru laughs at Kazuya adopting her feelings on marriage.

Backing down when the opportunity is there

For Chizuru to back down when she had the change to push their relationship forward past a point of no return is no surprise. This is precisely what she did back in the Date (?) arc when she asked if he had feelings for her (174). Given the opportunity to retreat back to safety, she did just that and attempted to reestablish a line between them and her position as the supportive rental girlfriend. Of course, Kazuya had already been pushed past that point; after all, Chizuru had no reason to withdraw the question unless she was invested in the answer.

This is perhaps the most overt backing down Chizuru has done so far, and even she knows it. Having walked right up to the line between them by tugging on his shirt and keeping him on top of her, she invents a total lie about there being something in his hair to weasel out of the situation of her own making. Chizuru may yet work up the nerve to do something that moves them foward without backing down, but grand gestures aren’t really her thing. The last grand gesture, after all, was the one she walked back the most vigorously: the kiss at Hawaiians, which she immediately claimed was no big deal (and again, Kazuya did not truly believe this). Chizuru remains most comfortable chipping away at the distance between them at a comfortable pace instead, sharing her past and her worries.

Unable to be truly open

Something that has been at cross-purposes for Chizuru’s character for a while now is the initial standoffish attitude she had with Kazuya in early chapters. Chizuru has been shown to be a kind, respectful woman to strangers in general and pretty normal with her friends, but with Kazuya, she famously flew off the handle in chapter 1 and remained combative with him for dozens of chapters. While that softened quite a bit over time, she still hits Kazuya with these backhanded compliments, both to his face during filming (131) and when talking about him to others such as Umi (125) and Sayuri (143). Chizuru very, very rarely says, unreservedly, that she likes or admires Kazuya without qualifying it against his quirks or issues.

One could say that Chizuru still hasn’t fully come to terms with her feelings. That much is probably true, but as one of the few supposedly cute things that Chizuru does (remember that Chizuru is not allowed to be conventionally cutesy except when she is deliberately putting on such an act, usually in the scope of her job), at some point this shtick has to be seen for what it is: part of the same toxicity that Kazuya’s family and friends push on him. Even though Chizuru finds Kazuya’s declaration of wanting the same thing in marriage as she does touching and moving, she also laughs, saying implicitly that his boldness is crazy and that he’s not standing up for his own desires, just like how she laughs at his fish outfits and metaphors. No amount of liking can be expressed unqualified, without something to balance it out or to hide behind. The one time she did so was when she said he was “such a great guy” (112) thanks to Sayuri.

And while Chizuru has let more and more of her worries and personal life through, she has still yet to say that she likes him (I mean this in the more neutral sense, not even as a form of attraction per se) or to touch him in a way that shows it without some safety net to fall back on or some criticism to use as a shield. And for Kazuya, a guy who is starved for unqualified affection, that’s hard to take.

Knowing Chizuru, it won’t be a spur of the moment thing. It will be something she has to pump herself up for, something that she has to work up the nerve to do, but it does need to happen. After all, Kazuya might not be prepared to believe anything short of that.

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