English Dub Review: Rent-a-Girlfriend “Rent-a-Girlfriend”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Kinoshita Kazuya just got dumped by his first girlfriend and in his heartbreak, he decided to rent a girlfriend. He meets one of the rental girlfriends, Mizuhara Chizuru at a cafe and they go on a date at the aquarium. Then he sees comments by several guys on their experience with Chizuru and feels toyed with, so Kazuya decides to tell her how he feels about the arrangement, and requests another date.

On the next date, Kazuya questions her on how she feels about doing what she does and lashes out at her at the aquarium. She drags him away from the crowd and berates him for his actions. Then he gets a phone call from the hospital about his grandma and rushes over with Chizuru following along. They put on the dating act until the end where they talk about their circumstances a bit before parting on relatively good terms. However, fate has other plans for them as the two meet again at their college.

Our Take:

From the first scene, the audience can see that Kazuya places a lot of importance on having a girlfriend, and how he acts right after his first break up. The messy room and the tissues right in front of him. Personally, his horniness was a little awkward for me, but his loneliness made me empathize as I continued watching the episode. The camera turns wavy as Kazuya reaches for his phone lit with the rent-a-girlfriend app on, and the audience is placed into his shoes for a moment. Furthermore when the camera zooms out the audience doesn’t see all of his room, they just see him with opened ramen cups and trash around him to empathize with his loneliness and frustration at that moment.

After that, the first scene is when Kazuya meets Chizuru and pays her at the cafe. It’s a reminder to the audience that what Chizuru offers is a service. The first date sets up the standard experience of Chizuru’s role as the rental girlfriend with a cheerful personality and sweet words to the hand-holding at the end of the date.

However, on the second date, it’s where the cracks start to show as Kazuya denies the illusion that they’re dating. Then when he vents about relationships at Chizuru in the aquarium, and the illusion of the date breaks completely. Now Kazuya is still emotionally vulnerable after his breakup. It’s evident that his ex hurt him from that brief flash of her face during his outburst at Chizuru as he thinks all girls are the same. However, it doesn’t give him the right to vent out on Chizuru which he realizes after Chizuru’s vent on him about his behavior throughout the entire date and he is apologetic for it which shows his character development from moving on from his self-centeredness.

Now that outburst allows Chizuru to really show her true self in front of Kazuya. She is understandably angry at him for his behavior and his one-star rating which hurts her perfect record that establishes that she’s a perfectionist. Then when the scene moves to the hospital the audience gets a better sense of who she is especially when the two are on the bench. She understands his loneliness and snaps him out of it with her complaint and then an offer to meet again using the app. Also when she introduces herself to his family the audience can only see her and a few cherry blossom petals fluttering into the room that heightens her actions from his family’s perspective.

Kazuya’s grandma definitely made the episode more enjoyable than I thought. Her personality gave me a good laugh with her questions to the couple. The animation of Kazuya’s face after she declares that they should celebrate on him getting a girlfriend was great in showing Kazuya literally sinking into regret. Kazuya cares about her a lot even from his own parents who belittle him. He goes as far as to call himself a grandma’s boy which explains the lengths he went to keep up the act.

The bench scene gives them a common ground for the two college students to open up after the wild hospital shenanigan that was a part of their dating act. Their goals with making their family happy and the unlying financial issues they both appear to have as college students make them relatable not only to each other but to the audience too. Personally, I had to restrain myself from getting snacks back in college because I had to save up.

Now despite the awkward reunion Kazuya and Chizuru find themselves in at the end of the episode, I’m interested in seeing whether or not these two will actually date for real.