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The most concerning thing was how this show seemed set up to have Ogiwara Sayu, a 17-year-old runaway from Hokkaido, primed for a romantic relationship with 26-year-old salaryman, Yoshida. When they meet, Sayu is sitting under a streetlight and Yoshida is walking home after getting drunk because his senpai at work wouldn’t notice him romantically. When the young girl asks him if she can stay at his place for a few days, drunk Yoshida agrees. When they get to his small apartment, he tells her to cook miso soup, the flavour of which is so good, drunk Yoshida’s decision to have her stay at his place seems like a good idea. Except, y’know, Sayu’s a child and he can’t harbour a minor without their parents’ permission, it’s a crime! Drunk Yoshida leaves all that to sober Yoshida, who gets the fright of his life waking up to a young girl cooking in his house!
Throughout the series, Sayu attempts to seduce Yoshida, but mostly in the beginning. Each time, Yoshida is clearly affected by the seduction but remains an adult by rejecting Sayu’s advances in a way that doesn’t destroy her confidence or make her feel weird. The series soon gets into why Sayu is so ready to have sex with this man she just met, but in the beginning, we have no access to Sayu’s past or Yoshida’s, so it looks like the makings of yet another age-gap romance anime. It also doesn’t help that when Yoshida’s colleagues find out about his new living arrangement, they constantly ask him if he’s fallen in love with Sayu or not, keeping the threat of that possibility alive in the mind of the viewer.
Even so; however, Yoshida’s stern position on the nature of his relationship with Sayu keeps this show from careening over the edge, and even in the final episode where Sayu attempts to initiate sex, Yoshida maintains that Sayu will always be an important person to him, and continues as he had been. This keeps the show on the side of wholesomeness, something we don’t really see enough of from characters in Yoshida’s position.
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