Rent-a-Girlfriend – 28 – Chin Up

Chizuru says it’s “ridiculous” to have a conversation about Kazuya being in love with her without Kazuya there, reiterates that he already told her his feelings, and steers talk back to photographing the rewards. When they part for the evening, Mini tells her merely wanting to see her succeed as an actress or helping her grandmother isn’t enough motivation to do all Kazuya is going.

There’s more there, and she believes true love can start even from something fake or on borrowed time. When Chizuru reacts to that, Mini snaps a photo and bids her goodnight. Right after that, Kazuya comes home, and Chizuru is too embarrassed to face him, and so retreats to her apartment without talking with him.

The next day, Chizuru meets with her actor friend Umi-kun, asking him to spread the word about her upcoming film. He agrees to retweet (re-X?) her crowdfunding page to his 200k-plus followers, but asks for something in exchange: that she go see a play with him. The date of the play happens to be July 28, which is not only today IRL, but the last day of the crowdfunding window.

Chizuru agreed to hand out fliers that day, but if she turns Umi down it will be awkward considering she asked him to promote the project. She relays this info to Kazuya and Mini, and despite Kazuya’s misgivings, Mini gets him to agree that Chizuru going on a date with the hot famous guy is the right move. He’ll have to lose this battle to win the war.

Kazuya is concerned that anyone who wants to go on a date with Chizuru either has designs on it going further, or just naturally arrives at that point because she’s so amazing. Unfortunately, he turns out to be correct in his assessment; Umi immediately struck me as someone who didn’t just ask a friend to fill in for his girlfriend.

Kazuya is down in the dumps about Chizuru going on the date, but snaps out of it when he realizes that both Ruka and Mini are still helping him. He tells Ruka he wouldn’t have gotten as far as he has without her and thanks her for everything (which makes her blush).

After the play, Chizuru is brimming with joy and giddiness about the performance she and Umi saw—just as Umi expected. He admits to her that he actually broke up with his girlfriend a week ago, and decided he wanted to pursue someone who was more serious about acting…someone like her.

Frankly, it’s a bit shitty for Umi to drop this on Chizuru, especially right after she just had a bunch of fun at the play. At the same time, I have to respect him for not settling and going after who and what he wants. When Chizuru declines his offer of a fancy dinner at an exclusive restaurant, he asks her if she’s in love with Kazuya.

He asks her this because he noticed the change in her demeanor around the same time she started spending more time with him. It’s not just Mini now saying this to her: Umi is convinced she likes Kazuya. All she can tell him there and then (after some smarmy school kids walk by) is that she doesn’t like Kazuya…but she doesn’t not like him either.

I don’t think that’s a cop-out, either; it’s as close to the truth as she can get right now. But the fact she didn’t stop at “I don’t like him” is huge. Despite being turned down by the girl he likes for someone he likely deems as far inferior in almost every way, Umi still follows through and retweets the crowdfunding page. That clinches it for me: Umi’s a good kid!

That retweet isn’t the only reason Chizuru and Kazuya not only meet the funding goal before midnight, but exceed it by 30,000 yen. But it is most definitely the push that was needed. I can’t imagine how demoralized the team would be if they’d come up just short. In the end, Umi chose Chizuru’s happiness and success over resentment or jealousy.

And when Kazuya shows Chizuru the met goal on his phone, her reaction of pure unbridled joy is even more powerful than after watching that play. They’ve got their script and their film crew, and now they’ve got their budget. It’s Go Time!

Rent-a-Girlfriend – 27 – Operation 203

Take it from someone who made a student short film: making one can feel like an endless checklist. But one thing Kazuya and Chizuru are able to check off relatively quickly this week is the script: they found a good one. Kazuya also managed to get their college’s film club to film it. Progress!

When Kazuya and Chizuru meet up for a meeting with the club president, she levels a joke at Kazuya about charging him for their “date” that gets him hook, line and sinker. It’s a little thing, but it says so much about how far they’ve come that she can mess with him.

At the end of the meeting it’s raining, and Kazuya runs off to buy an umbrella. The club prez tells Chizuru he had to meet the actor with whom Kazuya was so smitten he prostrated himself before the entire film club to get them to film his movie. Kazuya putting all this effort in motivates Chizuru to work just as hard in her role.

But while production logistics are taking shape, the crowdfunding page has stalled, with no new backers in the last 24 hours. While dropping in to ask her shisho about his progress with Chizuru, Mini catches a gander at the page, and offers her expertise and experience in crowdfunding and marketing.

Despite being a “zoomer” who pauses every two minutes to take a selfie, Mini proves she’s serious and diligent in her offer of assistance. This isn’t just apparent to him, but Chizuru and Ruka, when the two of them are summoned for a strategy meeting. Ruka identifies Mini as another threat, but she’ll do anything to help Kazuya, even if it means making a movie starring Chizuru.

While not doing producer work, Kazuya is pressed into service handing out fliers with Ruka, but when she can’t be around, he isn’t able to pass any out. Who should happen to cross paths with him than Sumi, making her first appearance this season.

While Kazuya puts on a brave face, Sumi is determined to help him out, because she’s an abominably good girl. She even delays dinner with her dad and overcomes her fear of speaking out loud to help him hand out fliers, and because she’s so goshdarn cute she has no trouble doing so. It’s not nearly enough Sumi Time, honestly, but I’ll take what I can get!

Finally, Mini visits Chizuru’s “main heroine” apartment for the first time, and is rightfully impressed. Chizuru made a good start in gathering some personal items she can offer as tiered rewards for backers, but Mini insists they have to take things further. Chizuru may see no value in a 100-yen scrunchie, but Mini says the fact it touched her skin makes it priceless to a potential backer.

Even though Mini knows she shouldn’t go through Chizuru’s unmentionables, instinct compels her to try anyway, resulting in a brief tussle with a Chizuru who has to draw the line somewhere. But the end result of the evening is an impressive haul of Ichinose Chizuru effects to use on the site.

Mini uses her time with Chizuru to try to get more of a sense of how she feels about Kazuya, starting with asking if she has a boyfriend, then asking if she’d ever considered him for the role. She acknowledges his good qualities—honest, kind, straightforward (most of the time)—but insists that his interest in her is “just as an actress”, and he wouldn’t be stupid enough to fall for a rental GF.

Mini makes clear to Chizuru right then and there that neither of those things Chizuru is so certain of are true at all. Kazuya does have romantic feelings for her, whatever he may have said in the past. Not only that, Mini is certain most if not all of Chizuru’s clients dreamt at one time or another that she’d become their real GF. The line in the sand between rental and real is just that: all too easy to cross, or wipe away entirely.

This information from Mini, a new but not altogether untrustworthy source, may well be the catalyst needed to move the needle on the Chizuru-Kazuya impasse. It’s more than a pact, and has been for some time. That doesn’t bode well for Ruka or Fumi, but hey, there can only be one. I was skeptical of Mini at first, but I’m really enjoying competence in marketing strategy, as well as in her self-appointed role as matchmaker.