Holiday Review: RENT-A-GIRLFRIEND

 Sadly, I must inform you all that shonen romances in 2020 can still be pretty dire, if today's review is any indication.

RENT-A-GIRLFRIEND (Kanoji, Okarishimasu), by Reiji Miyajima.  First published in 2017 and first published in North America in 2020.

PLOT:

Kazaya only intended to use the rental girlfriend service once.  He hoped it would help him get over his first girlfriend, who had just dumped him after a month.  He was matched up with the charming and lovely Chizuru, only to be infuriated by what he sees as her giving people a false front and a false sense of hope.  She privately chews him out for his hypocrisy and things might have ended there if not for a chance encounter on campus and their grandmothers getting the wrong idea about them.  Now they have to keep up this pretense of a relationship for their sake, and the lines between rental girlfriend and real girlfriend start to blur.

STORY:

I'm utterly baffled by Rent-A-Girlfriend.  Titles like this normally exist to be power fantasies for their male readership, but I can't imagine a soul who would ever want to trade places with a protagonist like Kazuya.

Kazuya is a dink, a doofus, a total chode.  He is a perfect storm of self-loathing, stupidity, and the sort of spiteful, short-sighted misogyny that can only result from a heartbroken, inexperienced teen boy.  He occasionally has moments of clarity where he tries to move forward, only to fall back to his loathsome ways when things don't go his way because it turns out that:

1. People who work in a service industry (such as...oh, I don't know, acting as a paid companion) might put on a kindlier front while on the job that may or may not be reflective of their everyday personality.

2. Girls are in fact multi-faceted people with minds and moods of their own and do not in fact exist as  a combination of personal accessory, mobile boob and vag unit, and magic wand entirely for the sake of sad, lonely young men.

Perhaps I am being a touch unfair to him.  After all, many young men struggle with self-esteem and the toxic notion that their manhood is directly tied to how early and often they have sex, and Kazuya is shown to be surrounded by a lot of other shitty young dudes who treat women as objects for consumption instead of as equals and people.  Yet Kazuya's few efforts at getting past this are surface-level at best.  When he's put into a spot, he falls back on those selfish, shitty impulses and often compounds his troubles by thoughtlessly lying to make himself look better.  

So yeah, Kazuya is kind of the worst and I hate that the story rewards his terribleness with Chizuru.

Poor Chizuru, the titular rental girlfriend of the title.  Even when she's not on the job, she comes off as a much more compelling character.  She's smart enough to see right through Kazuya and his bullshit and the only reason she doesn't disappear after the first few chapters is because of Kazuya's dumb mouth and the collective guilt of their grandmothers.  Sadly, after that point the story starts to devolve into a lot of the usual fanservice-based nonsense as she's forced to play along with his facade.  She deserves better than that.  Anyone deserves better than that, and you deserve better than to read something like this.

ART:

What's really sad is that Miyajima's art is way more charming than such a story deserves.  There's a lot of charm in his character designs.  Their faces and body language are lively and full of character.  He actually pays attention to fashion, letting their clothing say just as much about their personality as their posture or words do.  He uses perspective well to emphasize moments of panic.  He's good at capturing furtive, pervy gazes, peppering in close-ups of boobs and thighs in between conversation and Kazuya's guilty face.  He's clearly a good visual storyteller...if only that skill was put to use on a better story.

RATING:

Reading Rent-A-Girlfriend was as painful and protracted as pulling teeth.  Every minute with Kazuya on the page was an exercise in frustration.  Even if you enjoy the art, I can't imagine anyone being patient enough to see if this gets any better except for the dudes who are just as desperate and hopeless as Kazuya himself.

This series is published by Kodansha Comics.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 18 volumes available.  4 volumes have been published and are currently in print.

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