The Lungfish Diaries

“The Girlfriend and the Birthday II” is a story of Chizuru’s self-imposed expectations for returning Kazuya’s feeling—both admitting them and letting go of them, at least a little bit. Chizuru approaches her relationship with Kazuya with a fundamental misconception: that she must sacrifice more, and be better, in order to prove to herself she loves him enough to stand beside him. Though that mindset is quite similar to Kazuya’s sense of inadequacy, it is the opposite of what Kazuya wants from her: to feel included in her life, to be someone she wouldn’t choose to be without. Through Mini and Sumi’s guidance, Chizuru comes to understand that she can and should accept Kazuya’s generosity to reciprocate his affection—that she can and should be a little more selfish, and that doing so doesn’t make her unworthy of love. Chizuru puts aside her reticence to accept affection. (271) Chizuru has always felt unworthy of Kazuya’s love Chizuru has a long history of talking and...

One of the things I think useful about looking back an entire sequence of chapters now, instead of the weekly breakdowns, is the ability to put things in perspective. We sat through 6 chapters of Rent-A-Girlfriend doing its best slice of life comedy impression, and now we’re back in soap opera mode, raising the opportunity for a higher-stakes clash now that we see what Kazuya and Chizuru have to lose. Chizuru can now smile about this situation, with no regrets. (261) Accepting Kazuya closer to her heart We saw back in ch. 250 how Chizuru felt alone and disconnected , having had to move away from Kazuya and into the empty house her grandma left behind. That sense of isolation led her to contemplate reaching out to Kazuya, to go out past her bedtime to see him when given the slightest reason, and to accept the opportunity host him at her home—at least for the next month. Chizuru has emerged from the first few days of their new arrangement all the brighter for it. S...

Greetings, friends. The Lungfish Diaries has been on a bit of haitus due to vacations and various other things, but I’m happy to be back to talk about Rent-A-Giflriend ’s latest concluded arc. What may surprise people in this arc is just how much of an obstacle Kazuya’s emotional dishonesty with Chizuru is. It’s well established how dishonest Chizuru is—including some prime examples this arc—but Kazuya’s reluctance to be open and honest about his feelings is part of what keeps them from moving forward, and it’s his one moment of true honestly—given while too passed out to be aware of his words—that convinces Chizuru to move forward. Let’s take a look. To some, Chizuru acting like Kazuya might not take her up on her offer may come as strange, but indeed, from Chizuru’s perspective, it may seem a real possibility. (255) Kazuya has long kept his fullest, truest feelings under wraps Kazuya has held back from Chizuru for a long time. He famously denied being in love w...

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 i...

I won’t say too much about the obvious tease this week, with Chizuru asking Kazuya to wait while he’s still on top of her. Much has been said by other astute observers already about the evolution of her reaction here, from the first time in chapter 2, to the second time in chapter 59, where she got cut off after asking him gently to move. Miyajima loves his repetition and parallels, and I’ve said that a lot already, too, so there’s not much more to observe with that. Instead, I want to focus on this look. Chizuru says, “Oh?” That look is the dagger! This game’s over! Kazuya, my man, this is the look that tells you you’re in. Chizuru has been coy with Kazuya only a handful of times: When going to meet the director, she momentarily teases him about needing to pay like a rental (117) She slips back into girlfriend mode to get a reaction out of him on the cheer-up date (158) She touches a soda can to his neck, catching him off guard after the premiere (167) But...

This past week on Rent-A-Girlfriend , Chizuru brought Kazuya to her childhood home, and much of how Kazuya acted reminded her once again of her departed grandfather, Katsuhito. Kazuya’s supportive attitude and optimism (at least when it comes to anything outside himself) are traits he shares with Katsuhito, and the association between Katsuhito and Kazuya has been explicit ever since Katsuhito’s introductory arc. Moreover, it was heavily implied, retroactively at least, that Chizuru took a liking to Kazuya and cut him a lot of slack in part because his attitude toward his family is relatable to her. In other words, Chizuru felt comfortable with Kazuya (to an extent) from the start because he reminded her of Katsuhito. Seeing Kazuya spare no effort, just like Katsuhito once did, Chizuru can’t help but remember… Given how strongly Kazuya has paralleled Katsuhito, it’s valid to ask, then, whether Chizuru really loves anything about Kazuya at all outside of that feel...

This week, we get a long overdue interlude with Kazuya confronting the fallout with Kibe after Paradise and the now-revealed secret of Chizuru’s true identity among their friends. This is a great opportunity to look back at Kazuya and Chizuru’s attitudes toward their friendships and how both sets of relationships have something lacking. Let’s take a look. Kibe saying he’ll gut Kazuya is supposed to be a sweet moment. Mmkay. Kazuya and validation The big thing to remember about Kazuya is that his friends and family constantly doubt him. Recall that when Kuri and Kibe saw Kazuya with Chizuru, they immediately assumed she was trying to sell him something (or trying to get him involved in a cult). Played for laughs as this was, it is a constant theme in Kazuya’s relationships, as his family couldn’t believe Chizuru could be his girlfriend, either, and his father once assumed Kazuya could only be giving Chizuru money because he must’ve borrowed some from her before. In...

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 ...

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 tim...

There’s an interesting moment this chapter, building off of Chizuru’s previous request in 239. Chizuru asks Kazuya to bear with her and wait for her answer. Some people may be frustrated that Chizuru hasn’t come to a decision yet, but to the contrary, I think this is a positive development for Chizuru. The main point of friction during the Paradise Arc was that Chizuru felt trapped and unable to begin to figure out how to answer him. She couldn’t bring herself to ask for time, space, and understanding. The fact that she can do so now means she is freer to look into her own heart. Chizuru would ask something of him, rather than put his needs first at the cost of herself. Chizuru’s natural tendency is to agonize Chizuru has often seemed paralyzed when the moment mattered most. She became frozen on the spot in Paradise, when all eyes were on her (223). She didn’t have the heart to tell Sayuri on her deathbed when it became clear the end was near, prompting Kazuya to...

Over the last few weeks here at The Lungfish Diaries , I’ve attempted to move away from making predictions, mainly because I find spending energy on idle theorizing to be wasteful and often pointless. However, this week’s chapter plants several seeds that I think are likely to take root in the coming weeks: Chizuru thinks she played it too cool in asking him if he really loved “Mizuhara,” and this spurs her to reach out to him Kazuya begins to assume Chizuru has significant relationship experience and implicitly compares himself to a hypothetical ex-boyfriend of hers, not knowing that she very likely hasn’t ever been in a relationship Mini tells Kazuya he messed up in not affirming his love for “Ichinose” Put these together, and we conclude that Chizuru is coming over to (1) open up more about her real self, rather than merely suggesting that Kazuya doesn’t know the real her and is in love with her assumed persona, so that they can truly discuss the issue without judgment or assu...

What chapter 239 makes clear is that Chizuru wasn’t struggling to understand her feelings–or rather, her confusion in that regard isn’t what caused her to keep her distance for three months. Instead, she felt paralyzed because the various obstacles before her–the question of Ruka, the wisdom of potentially giving up her job, the uncertainty about Kazuya’s feelings for her vs. her persona–made her feel unable to even begin to figure it out. Chizuru, with nothing standing in her way of figuring out her feelings, smiles genuinely. Chizuru explains this chapter that her feelings are clouded, but rather than explain why they are clouded, or what she doesn’t understand, she digresses into two tangentially related topics: the thought that she needed to quit her job to make things right and that Kazuya might be in love with part of her that isn’t real. On the face of it, these questions don’t have any bearing to what her feelings are. If she weren’t in love with him, they wouldn’t m...

The grand confession finally got across in the clear this week. It was an aside, a footnote to a greater conflict. If you blinked, you might not have realized it happened at all. And yet, if you were paying attention, it was clear that the confession point point was never the real issue. It was, and always had been, a misdirection, a piece of narrative sleight of hand. Kazuya finally gets to say it in the clear. That goes back to the beginning, when it was clear, albeit not explicitly stated, that Chizuru understood what he was trying to say, at least in large part (175). And yet after that, Kazuya got tunnel vision. He became more preoccupied with the possibility of asking her out for real and following through the confession he thought had not been understood. That led us to Paradise, where we got one story about Kazuya, comically, trying to follow up on his confession attempt, while largely, but not completely, oblivious to what Mami was scheming or what Chizuru was...

Why a paid date? This, I think, is the most intriguing question about Chizuru’s choice of action in reaching out to Kazuya at long last. What purpose does it serve? The simple answer is that this is the ground she’s most comfortable on. Chizuru is uncertain about her feelings, and she may be seeking the safety and security of their paid relationship to sort this out, but taking a paid date is a serious choice. Accepting Kazuya’s money, at this point, is borderline unethical. The conflict between them is personal; it’s way over the line, and it shouldn’t continue in that way, as it can easily be construed as manipulating him and his feelings for monetary gain. More than that, they have something they desperately should discuss, and to ignore his attempts to talk about it personally, when the main issue at hand is an action of her doing, is simply wrong. So, with that in mind, I reject the idea that Chizuru is using the date merely as a comfortable space to work out her feelings… unl...

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. Mor...

Even having read this manga pretty much from the beginning, it’s shocking to see Chizuru let things get this far away from her. It has been clear for some time, even before she fully acknowledged it, that Chizuru was deeply in love with Kazuya and yet still holding herself back, and her weak excuse about falling in love with a client was nowhere near satisfying, so why has she done this? But I believe the answer lies in the core issues of Chizuru’s character, issues that have been in place from the beginning: her fear of attachment, her drive to be independent, and the longing she feels for connection and love. These drives are in conflict and always have been. They are why her actions do not seem rational. This is, potentially, an exciting time to be following Kanokari because Chizuru may have to change, to confront her issues, in order to move forward. Chizuru's competing needs have pulled her apart. Run down the events we’ve seen so far of this new arc, and the paralle...