Yoshimoto Shizuka, the tiny student librarian, has resigned herself to a life of solitude, and yet she still longs for her shining knight. Enter Aijou Rentarou, who happens to reach for the exact same romance novel as her, and we’re off to the lists.
Karane had been my favorite girlfriend so far due to her admirable yet often self-defeating commitment to tsundere values. I never thought she’d be unseated so quickly, and by someone who never utters a single word out loud! Yet Shizuka achieves the feat with ease.
I love how many parallels can be drawn between her favorite fantasy romance novel and her eventual romance with Rentarou. It starts with Rentarou finding out that Shizuka communicates through passages in the novel.
At first she believes this puts him off and she goes to find someone else to help him, but Rentarou never questions why she does this or suggests that she try speaking. He accepts her for who she is. And even when she goes overboard and suggests a hundred books, he’s eager to read them all. After all, romance is his favorite genre!
The only snag is a bureaucratic one: it takes a week to get a library card. So Shizuka gives him her favorite, which isn’t a library book but her personal possession. And it slaps. Rentarou reads all it in one night, and Shizuka brings Volume II the next day, just in case he did.
I cannot stress enough how cute these two are together. Rentarou may be aware that Shizuka is now one of his 100 soulmates after their eyes met, but the fact he must make her happy or she’ll die according to the god of love doesn’t really factor into the equation, because he’s having a blast getting to know this tiny, diligent, charming, romantic girl.
It’s important that Rentarou isn’t laboring to make a connection, the connection is simply there. When he tells her it’s amazing that she knows the novel so well she can instantly pick out passages with which to communicate, he means it. And it is amazing!
The tragic thing is, as amazing as Shizuka is, no one else has ever acknowledged it. She believes her means of communication makes her a “freak.” So when she spots Hakari and Karane flirting in their unique ways with Rentarou, her heart breaks, but she’s not surprised: of course he already has a girlfriend.
Even if he didn’t, she wouldn’t feel worthy. Her classmates called her tendency to speak through the book “creepy”, and her own mother is the one who called her a freak, brutally verbally abusing her until Shizuka is compelled to say a word out loud, but only one: “Sorry.”
While the promo art, OP, and ED serve as minor spoilers because we know she’ll end up with Rentarou, Shizuka doesn’t know that yet, and my heart hurt to see her so discouraged after he had lifted her spirits so high before.
But Rentarou foreshadowed things when he told his other two girlfriends he’d been up late a lot “getting busy”. He felt the odd can of coffee wasn’t sufficient thanks for introducing him to such a wonderful series of novels. He wanted to help Yoshimoto Shizuka in a meaningful, lasting way.
One day after school he comes to the library, and is relieved to find her there. He asks her to download an app, and then import a file to it. When she sees the file, Shizuka is shocked: it’s her favorite novel, in e-book form…but there is no e-book version!
The app turns out to be a text-to-speech program. Rentarou typed the whole damn novel into it over the last few nights. Why? With the speech (which is in her seiyu Naganawa Maria’s voice), those she’s speaking to no longer have to look at the text…they can look at her face while she’s “talking.”
Rentarou makes clear he could never ask Shizuka to speak out loud—at this point it’s part of who she is—but he hopes that this method will help her communicate better with others. When asked to give it a try, Shizuka’s first response in her new e-voice is a confession: I love you.
While she tries to then walk it back (again, using passages from the novel), Rentarou gathers her in his arms and tells her he loves her too. And again, he means it. She isn’t an obligation, nor does he want to be her shining, dragon-slaying knight. He’s simply fallen in love with her. This re-contextualizes the nature of his soulmates.
These three girls aren’t a burden or a duty. Meeting them, getting to know them, and dating them makes his life happier and fuller. And when the inevitable awkward conversation with Karane and Hakari occurs, something interesting happens. Karane initially believe he’s succumbed to brain rot, but Hakari is overjoyed and moved that he isn’t dumping them just because he’s found a new girlfriend.
As tends to be their dynamic, Hakari takes the plunge into acceptance first, and Karane follows suit. Her objections stem from her tsundere personality, but she truly does want to remain with Rentarou and Hakari, and just by being who she is, Hakari lends her the nudge she needs. The two girls complement each other, and keep each other in check.
As such, the Aijou Rentarou polycule grows from three to four with minimal pain. I can’t wait to see how Shizuka fits into and adds to their dynamic … and how eventually adding a fourth and fifth girlfriend will cause the romantic alchemy to evolve and adapt.
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