Tomorrow, I'll Be Someone's Girlfriend

Starring

• Ai Yoshikawaas Yuki Shirai

  A nineteen-year-old student who pays her way as a rental girlfriend and hides a childhood burn scar under make-up.

  Yuki Shirai’s story

  Yuki lets no one close; even Rina, her one friend at university, does not know what she does for money. Sota, a client, runs into her without make-up and sees the scar; she tells him what she really thinks, and he says it changes nothing. She shows the scar to Rina to end a quarrel, and meets a look of pity. On the night Aya loses her boyfriend and her job, Yuki holds an umbrella over her, and Aya answers the scar with a plain 'that must be hard'. On a hot-spring trip Sota says he loves her and wants to protect her. She pictures the ordinary life he offers, wonders whether it would still be her, and turns him down. A year later she is still someone's girlfriend for hire, on her own feet.

• Mayu Yokotaas Rina

  Yuki's only friend at university, popular and lonely, who fills the gap with paid dates with older men.

  Rina’s story

  Rina fills her loneliness with men. When a boyfriend turns out to be married, she goes off with two students who pick her up, and returns to the paid dates she had given up. Her regular, Iida, uses her birthday as an excuse to meet Yuki and offers Yuki a contract; Yuki refuses, and he drops Rina. Hearing that Yuki does work she has kept secret, Rina feels betrayed and accuses her, until Yudai, the young man she has begun seeing, asks whether she tells people she sleeps with the men who pay her. She goes to apologise. Yuki shows her the scar, and Rina cannot keep the pity out of her face. By the end she has stopped leaning on anyone, and a year later she is making her own way as a model.

• Misato Ugakias Aya Nakatani

  A thirty-five-year-old rental girlfriend who lies about her age and works to pay for surgery after surgery.

  Aya Nakatani’s story

  Aya has remade almost her whole face, and hides her age, her job and her surgery from her boyfriend, Mitsuharu, who wants to marry her. She means to finish every operation first, and to pay for them she takes money from clients outside the agency. When Mitsuharu finds out what she does, she tells him everything and shows him her old photographs; he calls her face a lie and leaves. Complaints pour in, and the agency fires her. That night Yuki holds an umbrella over her in the rain, and over drinks Aya tells her story and meets Yuki's scar without pity. It is too late to change how she lives, she says, and she has the operation she wanted. A year later she is still earning for the next one.

• Yumena Yanaias Moe Maya

  A student sure she is not like other girls, until she falls for a host and gives everything to him.

  Moe Maya’s story

  Moe privately looks down on girls like Rina. At her regular bar she meets Yua, who takes her to a host club, and there Kaede, gentle and easy to talk to, is the only one she can show her weakness to. When he runs to her one night as she sits crying, she is lost. To pay for her visits she borrows from her mother, spends her scholarship money and then begins sex work, and she drops out of university. On the night of his birthday, with the money saved, she walks away from him without a word, and tells the owner of her regular bar, smiling, that she has had a great love. A year later she is at beauty school, and can smile at Kaede's face on a passing advertising truck.

• Nagisa Saitoas Yua Takahashi

  A young woman who came to Tokyo for freedom and spends everything she earns in sex work on her host.

• Mizuki Kayashimaas Runa

  The second season's heroine, a student paying her own way in a high-end soapland, whose romance with an online idol ends after his fans expose it.

Why it matters

Tomorrow, I'll Be Someone's Girlfriend is about the market in warmth: rental girlfriends, papa-katsu, host clubs and the sex work that pays for them, an economy in which young women sell company or buy it. The media tend to sensationalise such women and the public to deride them; the drama, adapted from a manga that spread by word of mouth online, refuses to laugh. It asks what each of them is short of — money, a family that loved her, a face she can bear, someone who listens — and treats what she chooses as a choice. It does not pretend the choices are safe. Moe's slide from her first night at a host club to dropping out and doing sex work is set out step by step, and the men on the other side of the money are neither monsters nor rescuers. The question it leaves is hard: when closeness has a price, who is buying, and who is being bought?