Rent-A-Girlfriend Volumes 27-29 Review

The Rent-A-Girlfriend anime is currently back on our screens for a fifth season which is still covering the Resort Arc. Meanwhile, the manga has moved on to pastures new, but what’s next for Kazuya now that his well-kept secret has been brought to light? This review contains spoilers for anime viewers!

During the Resort Arc that has taken up the last few volumes, Kazuya and Mizuhara were forced to finally come clean about Mizuhara being a rental girlfriend. However, they did manage to smooth things over by sharing a kiss and reassuring everyone that Mizuhara is actually Kazuya’s girlfriend and things simply started with the rental situation. We readers know this isn’t entirely the truth, as Mizuhara is still very much only playing the part of girlfriend and is still working as a rental, but neither of our main characters could bring themselves to break the heart of Kazuya’s grandmother.

Now having returned home to Tokyo, Kazuya can’t stop thinking about the kiss they shared. It was so passionate that he’s wondering if it meant something to Mizuhara, but no matter how many times he rings her doorbell or leaves her text messages, she won’t respond to him. In fact, three months pass, and Kazuya hears absolutely nothing from her, and he’s now an emotional wreck. Clearly unable to make any progress on their own, neighbour Mini, who has just returned from a trip abroad, steps in!

Mini tells Mizuhara point blank that she can’t keep ignoring Kazuya’s feelings for her, nor can she keep avoiding whatever she feels toward him out of a sense of guilt about Ruka (who still sees herself as Kazuya’s girlfriend despite his attempts to break it off). There’s a lot of emotional baggage here, and perhaps the best solution is to meet on neutral ground, so Kazuya decides to rent Mizuhara and take her on a date in Harajuku.

With a lot of the preamble out of the way, Volume 28 finally has these two share a heartfelt exchange of feelings. There’s no more running or hiding; Mizuhara is finally honest with Kazuya and says that she might have feelings for him, but she needs time to figure it out. Time that Kazuya is more than happy to give her if there’s any hope for a potential relationship at all! And at least now they’re finally speaking. But the happy times don’t last for long when disaster strikes their apartment complex…

I often say that Rent-A-Girlfriend is best read in chunks, and that’s true here as well. Volume 27 on its own doesn’t do a whole lot to move the story along, but reading another two in addition gives you an interesting throughline. I also appreciate that now we’re out of the Resort Arc, the drama has been toned down a few notches, and we’re back to a storyline that feels relatively realistic (by the standards of this series). I’m sure it feels slow if you read it volume to volume, but looking back where the characters are now is entirely different to how things stood before the Resort Arc. Even if Kazuya and Mizuhara went in circles for a bit while they avoided one another.

Of course, Rent-A-Girlfriend is often ridiculous, and the more silly parts of the story end up trending on social media and making the rest of it look bad. However, I think stretches of story like this show the strengths of Reiji Miyajima’s writing. He is perfectly capable of reining it in and showing us something heartfelt and raw, which makes you feel for the characters. Slowly but surely the cast are moving forward, and I still enjoy watching over them as their relationships and lives change, even as we approach a staggering 30 volumes (with 45 and counting out in Japan!).

These three volumes of Rent-A-Girlfriend come to the West thanks to Kodansha and continue to be translated by Kevin Gifford with lettering by Paige Pumphrey, who both do an excellent job. Sadly, as is usually the way with this series, there’s not much in the way of extras. A comedic short at the end of the volume, but no translation notes or colour pages.

Since I last reviewed the series, Kodansha has raced ahead and released volumes all the way through to #36, with #37 being the next release in June. As stated earlier, there are 45 volumes of this and counting out in Japanese, so we’re still trying to catch up currently. At this rate this is surely going to be one of Kodansha’s longest-running English series in print…

Overall, these three volumes of Rent-A-Girlfriend show a promising new future in the making for our cast. Now that we’ve returned to their everyday lives and there’s less drama, we’re getting to see how much everyone has grown. The series isn’t always great, but it’s a soap opera-style story that’s hard to look away from, especially when Reiji Miyajima brings his A-game to the writing.

Our review copies from Kodansha were supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.