I am currently watching the ongoing fourth anime season of Rent-A-Girlfriend, TMS’s animated adaptation of a Reiji Miyajima’s ongoing manga (of eight years) of the same name (Kanojo Okarishmasu in Japanese). When the now-completed third season was announced in 2023, I described the first two seasons as “not … good” and the series as a whole as, charitably, “a watchable bad show.” The third season was definitely less bad than the second and arguably less bad than the first, but not less bad enough to warrant being mentioned in my 2023 year-end anime review. You may be wondering then why I am watching the fourth season. The honest answer is either inertia or inability to look away, but the best answer is that I must have known that the sixth episode of the fourth season (episode 42 overall) would provide the basis for a new article in my ongoing series on anime hair color – specifically the hair color of the show’s protagonist, Mr. Kazuya Kinoshita.
Expand to learn more about my Japanese anime/manga/novels/games hair color series…
I have written many posts examining how we should understand unusual or seemingly unnatural hair colors in anime and Japanese manga, light novels, and games. I have also written a couple of posts on hair color-dress code issues in Japanese schools. You can find all of my articles in our regularly updated Hair Color in Japanese Anime, Manga, and Games collection article.
A Brief Introduction To Rent-A-Girlfriend
In light of the fact that my hair color article does not need much context and I generally introduced the show in my season three preview, I will keep things brief.
The “main” character of Rent-A-Girlfriend is a college student named Kazuya Kinoshita. He is a nondescript, indecisive, immature young man with severe self-confidence issues (not entirely unfounded, but he has rare moments which suggest there is something more there). He is often cringe as the kids would say, but he is usually too pitiful to actually mean harm. We meet Kazuya in the first season when he is reeling from being dumped by his first girlfriend, Mami Nanami, who is one of the two characters in the cast who make Kazuya look great by comparison. In the dumps, he patronizes a rental girlfriend service and rents a very pretty young woman who plays the role of rental girlfriend perfectly, “Chizuru Mizuhara,” whose real name is Chiziru Ichinose (I will use “Mizuhara” in the article since that is what she is called most often in the show). The rental dates go well until Kazuya throws a tantrum about how terrible rental girlfriends are. Now I forget the precise details of how things went at the start, but Mizuhara ends up accompanying Kazuya to the hospital where he sees his grandmother. Mizuhara’s grandmother is also at the hospital and she is friends with Kazuya’s grandmother. One thing leads to another and both of the grandmothers are overjoyed that their grandchildren are dating. If that coincidence were not enough, it turns out that Kazuya and Mizuhara are actually next door neighbors and they go to the same college. What a twist! Kazuya, being an indecisive mush, is unable to admit the truth to his grandmother. Mizuhara is a decisive mush for her grandmother and, undoubtedly unwisely, goes along with the arrangement – providing that Kazuya must continue paying for rental girlfriend dates and maintain appropriate boundaries. Much of the drama in the show comes from Kazuya digging himself into deeper and more embarrassing holes, although Mizuhara is far from free of responsibility for the increasingly convoluted mess (I dare say she takes on more and more of the responsibility as time goes on).
Despite the fact that the show is centered on Kazuya’s growing romantic feelings for Mizuhara and their strange, increasingly blurry, relationship (especially in the third season when they actually do something constructive, albeit not actual dating), the show loves throwing non-Mizuhara female characters into the mix. Kazuya’s mentally unbalanced ex-girlfriend, Mami, takes an inexplicable, twisted interest in Kazuya’s affairs despite the fact that she showed little interest in him when they actually dated (insofar as the show suggests). Another one-time rental girlfriend, Ruka Sarashina, who is one of the most genuinely obnoxious 2D people I have had the misfortune of watching in nearly two decades of enjoying anime, makes Mami appear well-adjusted by comparison with her obsessive interest in Kazuya, and I am not ready to rule out the possibility that she will Nice Boat this whole saga before it is all said and done. Another rental girlfriend, the sweet but painfully shy Sumi Sakurasawa, has a small role in the story as the nice girl who would obviously be the best choice for Kazuya, but who will even more obviously remain a bit player in an unnecessarily protracted saga. Finally, the third season introduced an energetic internet video creator by the name Mini Yaemori. Prior to the third season I wrote a brief post expressing my skepticism that the cure for the show’s ills was yet another attractive female character who would likely have some strange interest in the dull Kazuya. While Mini defied expectations and turned out to be the first significant non-elderly woman character to lack a strange interest in Kazuya, she did not add much to the show other than being willing to say out-loud what the main characters could not articulate, lest they risk wrapping things up before the eighth season.
Speaking of wrapping up, that concludes my gentle introduction to the plot of Rent-A-Girlfriend. Now let us talk about what we are really here for: Hair color in Rent-A-Girlfriend.
Kazuya and Hair Color Context in Rent-A-Girlfriend
Kazuya has what I would describe as light brown hair, although the slight orange tint of his spiked hair reminds me of that of the more famous orange-haired Ichigo Kurosaki of Bleach.
Despite the fact that I began my journey as a scholar of anime hair color between the first and second seasons of Rent-A-Girlfriend, I never thought much about Kazuya’s hair color. Why would the show care about the whiny insert character’s hair color? I never thought about it in those exact terms, but those terms probably explain why I never thought about it. This is not to say that no thought went into Kazuya’s design. He seems to like pants that stop at his ankles (as to emphasize his lack of socks), t-shirts, and bad posture sometimes reminiscent of the “Virgin” in the “Virgin vs Chad” memes. Kazuya’s grandmother is a significant character in the show, but her gray hair does not give us any hints about Kazuya.
In my first article on 2D person hair color analysis, I took the position that in order to understand whether a character with unusual hair color is understood to have an unusual hair color in the work itself or whether the hair color is a matter of artistic discretion, we should first ascertain the context of the work’s world. Rent-A-Girlfriend is a simple case. The show is set in modern-day Japan and there is no magic in the setting other than whatever sorcery conjures show’s remarkable plot-driving (or stagnating) coincidences. All of the major characters are college students and their college does not appear to have a dress code, which rules out one possible impediment to hair coloring. There is nothing about the show that suggests characters should be expected to have unusual hair colors. Conversely, the use of hair dye would not be unexpected. Kazuya is presented as a Japanese character and there are no references to his having a non-Japanese parent. His orange-tinted light brown hair is not the expected natural hair color for a Japanese man, so we can assume that the show portrayed Kazuya this way for artistic reasons (e.g., to make the young man whose principal character trait is not standing out stand out as the main character) or because he actually has light brown hair in the world of Rent-A-Girlfriend, which would suggest hair dying.
Perhaps we can learn something from the many somewhat-to-very troubled women in Kazuya’s life, all of whom are drawn to be attractive cover ladies for the ever-growing number of Kanojo Okarishmasu manga volumes. They are a mixed bag in terms of hair color (note that there is no indication to the best of my recollection that any of them have non-Japanese parents).
Kazuya’s love interest and sometimes-rental girlfriend, Mizuhara, has dark brown hair in the anime. She is an actress who moonlights as a rental girlfriend as “practice” (naturally) and to earn money to support her career, so it would not be surprising for her to dye her hair. However, in third-season flashbacks to when Mizuhara was in junior high school and high school, she appears to have the same brown hair color.
We have seen that dark brown hair is often used as a natural hair color for Japanese characters, see e.g., Uka Ishimori, the main heroine of Honey Lemon Soda. In light of the fact that Mizuhara appears to have the same brown hair color in flashbacks, I do not think there is much reason to believe that the anime is trying to convey she is dying her hair, especially since we will see a bit further down that the show uses flashbacks to depict change in hair color in other cases. However, it is possible that Mizuhara has black hair, or at least a brown more inclined to black, in the world of Rent-A-Girlfriend, and that giving her chestnut brown hair instead of black was an act of aesthetic discretion for designing the young woman who is effectively the second main character and described as being beautiful by Kazuya and other characters and passers by who opine on the subject.
Ruka and Mini have black hair, although Mini has two blue streaks. It seems likely that Ruka’s hair is all natural and Mini went slightly blue for her internet celebrity career. The two other girls are more interesting – at least in a hair color sense. Sumi’s light orange-strawberry-hair (hard to describe) reminds me of Yuki Itose’s dyed hair in A Sign of Affection. Sumi is painfully shy – but she is working as a rental girlfriend to overcome her shyness (very realistic course of action), and in any event shyness does not mean one cannot dye her hair (see e.g., Yuki Itose), so I will assume Sumi has modified her hair color.
Kazuya’s potentially dangerous ex-girlfriend, Mami, has bright blonde hair. Mami is the most fashion-conscious member of the cast in day-to-day life, so I assume that she went for an aggressive blonde coat of paint.
But Kazuya? I assumed nothing. Had you asked, before episode 42, I would have probably said that he had main character-colored hair. While I do not remember everything that happened in the first two seasons of the show in granular detail, I do not recall any mention of Kazuya’s hair color (and I suspect I would have caught such a mention in seasons two and three given my work on The New Leaf Journal). We have seen many shots of Kazuya’s very messy room and apartment, but no boxes of hair dye (I will grant I may have missed the hair dye while trying to avert my eyes from his depressing apartment).
The Nature of Kazuya’s Brown Hair
But then came episode 42, and specifically a flashback scene to several years earlier (I think Kazuya is in junior high school in the flashback). As I noted earlier, flashbacks to Mizuhara’s past suggested that the main woman in the series was not dying her hair. However, the same cannot be said of the main man – Behold:
Kazuya has black hair in the flashback!
As we learned in my hair color surveys of A Sign of Affection and Honey Lemon Soda, flashbacks have a way of resolving our hair color questions. Kazuya had black hair in his younger days and brown hair in college. I now consider the mystery resolved: Kazuya has naturally black hair is dying his hair light brown.
Why Does Kazuya Dye His Hair?
Kazuya is not the first bland male lead character to be confirmed to going from black to brown hair. I previously covered the unexpected hair color case of Kaede Komura in The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses. That case was unexpected because I would have imagined that the girl Komura liked, who had some of the most highly animated brown hair in anime history, would have been the hair color case rather than Komura. But we discovered in episode nine of that show that Komura had been talked into dying his hair brown by his mother.
To date, Rent-A-Girlfriend has confirmed the fact that Kazuya dyes his hair, but not why. We are left to speculate.
Although I had not thought about Kazuya’s hair before, character context gives us a plausible explanation for why he goes through the trouble of dying his hair brown. One reason Kazuya is depressed after being dumped by Mami at the start of the show was because Mami was his first girlfriend and he had been fixated on having a girlfriend. One comes away with the impression that Kazuya’s number one goal going into college was to secure a girlfriend and do things with said girlfriend. It is worth noting that one of Kazuya’s two best friends, Kuri, is similarly focused on having a girlfriend and has a similarly unexpected hair color (see below).
One could see him dying his hair in an effort to be more attractive to women. Moreover, as I noted at the top, Kazuya is at least somewhat style-conscious, granting that I do not like his style. Taken together, I will guess that Kazuya, like the more pleasant and likable Yuki Itose of A Sign of Affection, began dying his hair after high school and before college as part of a re-invention of sorts. Alas, had he also re-invented his approach to life, he may have found himself a real girlfriend by now in light of the fact that he does show some signs of competence and initiative in his better moments.
Conclusion
Rent-A-Girlfriend is not a good show. It would not be impossible to spin something interesting out of a show about a hapless, lonely young man with self-esteem issues developing a strange relationship with a rental girlfriend after having had an attractive woman confusingly agree to date him before unexpectedly dumping him. Rent-A-Girlfriend has brief moments when it wants to be interesting, but it too often leans on absurd coincidences, generally subpar writing, unnecessary characters (namely Ruka – Ruka is terrible), implausible plot developments, and a deep fear of not going two steps forward without immediately going one-and-three-quarter steps back. One reason the show (if not the underlying series) may be mired in a bog of its own making is because it often seems unable to decide whether we should want Kazuya and Mizuhara to become a real couple (we should not, but that would have to be the subject of a different essay), notwithstanding the fact that I would be stunned if that is not the ultimate outcome (barring the Ruka-driven Nice Boat ending I speciously suggested while summarizing the plot). But while I am a bit hard on Rent-A-Girlfriend, I had underestimated its depth on the issue of Kazuya’s hair color. It subtly (not a word often used in connection with Rent-A-Girlfriend)revealed that Kazuya dyes his hair. Upon considering the issue, I concluded Kazuya’s hair color fits his character. While it may be a stretch to say that the Kazuya hair color reveal was worth watching 42 episodes (and counting), I am glad Rent-A-Girlfriend finally gave me a full article topic.
