Rent-A-Girlfriend

Image source: Wikipedia Image

Who would have thought that somebody would make an anime harem comedy?

Kazuya Kinoshita is dumped by his girlfriend Mami Nanami after dating for a month. He then decides to use an online app to rent a girlfriend named Chizuru Mizuhara, a beautiful and attractive girl. However, because she appears to be too perfect, he gives her a low rating. When Chizuru berates him for that, he realizes she is meaner than he expected. However, when Kazuya’s grandmother collapses in the hospital, he brings her along and his grandmother is smitten with how great she is. Kazuya continues renting Chizuru in order to keep up appearances with his family and friends, but things get complicated when they discover they are next-door apartment neighbors and attend the same college. Later, other girls from the girlfriend business also join in dating and showing interest in Kazuya.

Source: Wikipedia

Not as bad as I initially feared, but hard to recommend.  At least half the reason I’m watching it is that I enjoy one of the voice actresses – Sora Amamiya.  She is also known by her fans as Ten-chan as that is an alternate reading of her name.  It also works because she is a bit of “ten nen” or  天然  which can be used for an “air head” in English.  In a bit of rarity she actually looks a bit like the character she plays.


Japanese: 彼女、お借りします

Romanized: kanojo, okarishimasu

English Title: Rent-A-Girlfriend

I chose this particular anime title because it is an example of why I will never become truly fluent in Japanese.  The verb that I was familiar with for “to rent” was 貸す (kasu).  So I used this anime as a reason to learn some more vocabulary.  Fortunately the manga cover actually has the romanized Japanese so no need to try to figure out the reading of the kanji 借.  So hitting the dictionary I can find 借りる, 借り and 借る and a few others, but nothing that could initially be read from お借りします.  Or so I thought.  Mind you they read as some form of “lending” and I understood the meaning and tense generally, but I can’t figure out the verb form.

Conveniently enough I was going to be speaking with my friend with whom I do language exchange.  This gave us something to talk about and she quickly set me straight.  I realized I did indeed learn the verb form, but it is one I never use.  It’s how you turn a verb into its polite and humble form.  Normally this would be used in the service industry like hotels and restaurants.  It makes perfect sense to use it here as the work is is essentially in the “service industry” as well.

彼女 – “kanojo” – This word is a bit interesting in that it can mean either “she”, “her” or “girlfriend”.  It’s use is contextual so being vague with its usage fits with all of the vagaries of the Japanese language.

お借りします – The one that stumped me.  The base verb is 借りる  (かりる, kariru).    First take the verb and put into what’s called the “masu stem” – 借ります.  Next, drop the “masu” part – 借り.  Now we add the honorific “o” that Japanese uses with lots of words to make them polite – お借り.  Finally add the verb “suru” to the end of the verb. However, in this case we need it to be both polite and current tense – “shimasu” giving us – お借りします.

So someone is humbly renting you (or us) a girlfriend.  The form is already quite polite, but we could take make this even more polite.  Instead of using “suru” here you can use “itasu”.  We also need to make “itasu” polite and present tense – いたします.  So that would become お借りいたします (okariitashimasu).

Quick rule of thumb in Japanese is the longer the expression the more polite it is.  Also note the meanings conveyed by this title aren’t really word for word translatable to English.  You’d have to add additional context to convey the same meaning in English.

Omake:

Rent-a-Girlfriend – Opening Full『Centimeter』by the peggies