Kanojo, Okarishimasu is a shonen romance manga serialized in one of the most popular shonen manga magazines - Weekly Shonen Magazine. Written and drawn by Reiji Miyajima, it competes directly with other romance titles in the magazine like Domestic Girlfriend, Boarding School Juliet, and 5-toubun no Hanayome. It sells decently, but not as much as its competitors and I'm sure you can guess why.
Paying for dating and sex services has always been a controversial topic among the dating community. The majority of people hold the firm belief that you can't "pay" for love, which is true, but the reason why these kinks exists is because they are substitutes for real relationships.
Our protagonist, Kazuya Kinoshita is a freshman college student who was recently dumped by his ex. Looking to relieve himself of his breakup, he seeks solace in a rental girlfriend app called "Diamond". There, he comes across one of the top-ranked rental girlfriends named Chizuru Ichinose (she uses a different last name for her Diamond profile for privacy purposes). And the romantic comedy shenanigans go from there.
Frankly, if I were to compare this manga to its competitors, I wouldn't say it's any different. Its romantic tension is derived from ridiculous coincidences that force the two main romantic interests to be in the vicinity of each other, which is what normally captures readers since this is next to improbable in real life. In fact, I would say the closest comparison in my opinion would be Nisekoi - both the romantic love interests are pressured to fake their relationship due to family pressure.
So let's move on to the juicy stuff: the main criticism of this manga. The premise. Kazuya is like any other shonen romance main character; spineless, unmanly, and not willing to take risks which is what makes it easy for the author to continue writing chapters without anything significant happening. However, Kazuya gets a lot more criticism that other main characters not because he's indecisive, but simply because of the fact that the romance revolves around a sugar daddy service. I'm not going to go into depth about the morals of this premise but I will say: if this romance was based off any other setting, it would be much less criticized and more popular.
The reason why I absolutely love this manga though, is because the author had the guts to use a premise that is highly controversial, and create a semi-realistic romance story out of it. Everything in this manga is extremely well done, including the characters and plot contrary to popular belief. If you treat this premise like you're not offended just by the fact that it's controversial, then you will have an insanely fun time reading this if you self-insert as Kazuya.
The story doesn't exactly portray Kazuya as a bad person even though he does stupid things you would expect from a romance lead. He is in fact, quite genuine with what he desires and tries to make things right regardless of the outcome. In fact, he is so relatable if you've been through romantic troubles that it's insanely easy to self-insert into him. The only difference is that he's a realistic protagonist that gets into unrealistic situations, which makes it the perfect story to enjoy as long as you don't have a problem with the premise.
If you would like to read a manga where the setting and characters try to take a risk to do something different, then this is definitely the manga for you. If you like to stick to vanilla manga and don't like reading anything that might offend your morals and values, then don't read this. However I would still like everyone to be more open-minded and give this manga a shot, because you will never discover anything new if you only stick to what you're comfortable with.
