Rent-A-Girlfriend author Reiji Miyajima has repeatedly faced backlash from a segment of the manga’s fandom his perceived obsession with the story’s female lead, Chizuru Mizuhara.
The criticism stemmed from multiple posts Miyajima had shared on his official X account, which depicted him going on dates with the fictional character and referring to her as his girlfriend…despite being a married man.
Furthermore, the author has also been accused of using the protagonist, Kazuya Kinoshita, as a self-insert character to achieve his own personal happy ending.
And now, in a recent interview with Anime Corner, Miyajima revealed that the character he felt the closest to in the series was the protagonist Kazuya. In fact, he even went to the extent of calling the character his double, or his clone.
“The one closest to me is the protagonist, Kazuya. It’s almost like a double: what I think, Kazuya thinks roughly the same,” Miyajima told Anime Corner.
On top of that, while talking about portraying female characters in the series, the author labeled Chizuru as the ideal woman.
“I try to draw each character the way she herself would want to look. Chizuru, for example, is the ideal woman – with long black hair and so on,” Miyajima said.
These comments from Miyajima have only fueled the controversy further, with readers now doubling down on the assumption that the author is looking to live out his fantasy in the manga.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that the Miyajima has admitted that he and Kazuya share the same personality.
“I say what I want through Kazuya. As a result, readers tell me the story is funny and relatable, and that helps me emotionally,” the author said in an interview with Kodansha back in 2023, as seen below.
Interestingly, Miyajima was initially accused of delaying Kazuya and Chizuru getting together in the manga due to his own unresolved emotions.
This theory gained more traction when Chizuru ultimately rejected Kazuya when the latter proposed.
However, following that development, Kazuya underwent a makeover (in chapter 399) and started bearing an uncanny resemblance to Miyajima himself, especially his hairstyle.
This led the readers to believe that the author was trying to use Kazuya to live out his own fantasy.
Some fans of the series, however, have defended the author claiming that Miyajima might have based Chizuru on his wife, which would explain why he acts obsessed with her all the time.
However, in a 2020 interview with Kodansha, Miyajima stated that Chizuru, and even the other heroines of the story, were not based on anyone he knew.
In fact, he based all the characters on different aspects of himself. The author described his creative process as translating his internal artistic conflicts into the personalities of his characters.
“If I have to say, it’s all about me… For example, when I’m drawing manga, one side of myself respects following rules and thinks this is the way I should draw, and other side of myself thinks,”No, but I want to draw this way”. There is an internal conflict within me. Mizuhara is a character who has a strong sense of reality and respects these rules, while Kazuya is a character who has a strong sense of dreaming about what he wants to draw.
In this way, I’m trying to strengthen the part of myself that’s inside me and think about the personality aspect of my characters, so all the models are me, if I have to say anything about comparing to a real-life model.“
Originally launched in Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine in July 2017, Rent-A-Girlfriend follows college student Kazuya Kinoshita, who decides to rent a girlfriend named Chizuru Mizuhara after experiencing a sudden breakup. The story the follows his attempts, over 400 chapters and still ongoing, to woo Chizuru.
Source: Anime Corner
