Hinata Chihiro wa Shigoto ga Tsuzukanai (日向千尋は仕事が続かない) Review

I.

A while back, my workplace went through a pretty brutal stretch of overtime.

The work itself wasn’t much — just a system upgrade. Once the main system was upgraded, we had to debug the software and interfaces that talk to it. After that, we could go home.

Sounds simple, right? The catch: the main system upgrade had to happen in the middle of the night and took several hours.

The estimate was that the main system would finish upgrading around 2 a.m., and our auxiliary systems could only start testing after 2. By the time we wrapped up, it’d be 3–4 a.m.

The original plan was to upgrade on Saturday, then use Sunday—when fewer people are on the system—to test and fix issues, so everything would be ready for Monday.

That plan fell apart fast. Saturday’s upgrade went terribly.

The upgrade that was supposed to finish at 2 a.m. dragged on until 6 a.m. and then failed outright. Data rollback, all that work for nothing. The one silver lining: we finally found the cause, so the next attempt should go smoothly. Which meant they also announced another upgrade session on Sunday. In other words, round two of the 2 a.m. nightmare.

No sleep Saturday night, then do it all over again Sunday. Killer.

Sunday night’s upgrade actually went fine. Everything finished at 2 a.m. as planned, testing followed, and by around 4 a.m. we were done and told to go home and rest.

I got home at 4:30 and couldn’t sleep. I opened my phone and scrolled Twitter: Osaka’s own black-shark otaku was there retweeting porn like a dog in heat, Ogura Yui had a new selfie, and the secret accounts I follow were posting all sorts of youthful legs…

And then I noticed something strange: I felt absolutely nothing looking at any of it. My usual high libido was gone. I just wanted to lie there and do nothing.

In that moment I felt like a puddle of mud. Mud has no libido.

II.

A few days ago at dinner, I heard some news.

A young woman from our office is getting married in late May. The real surprise: she’s marrying another person from the same office.

So two coworkers, same office, getting hitched. And the wild part is they acted like complete strangers at work. None of us had any idea they were dating.

Later my wife told me that’s the awkward part of office romances—you see each other every day. If the relationship ends, if one confesses and gets rejected, you still have to face each other daily. Awkward as hell.

Fortunately, this one seems to be heading toward a happy ending.

I’ve been through the “dating a coworker” thing myself. Back then I pursued a girl from our unit, later found out she was stringing me along, eventually got the friend zone card, and realized I’d been her wallet the whole time. After that I never set foot in her department again, and I’d go out of my way to avoid that part of the building.

These days I don’t care anymore. Seeing the person who dumped me turn ugly, still waiting for translated BL doujinshi while I can listen to raw BL drama CDs no problem—I feel a deep sense of superiority. I almost want to get in her face and mock her.

But this kind of “close-quarters office romance” is just too awkward. Whether it works out or not, it’s awkward. By the way, those two lovebirds at my office still act like strangers every day even after the relationship came out. Are they just that in sync, or is their love life especially Platonic?

So sometimes I wonder: if a couple dates in the office and does 996 overtime together, what happens to their relationship? Does it eventually turn into a sexless live-in arrangement?

A game answered that question for me pretty quickly: Hinata Chihiro wa Shigoto ga Tsuzukanai (日向千尋は仕事が続かない, roughly “Hinata Chihiro Can’t Hold Down a Job”).

III.

Hinata Chihiro wa Shigoto ga Tsuzukanai has a very simple, blunt premise (I feel like I’ve been saying that a lot lately). Our protagonist runs into his childhood classmate Hinata Chihiro at a small restaurant years later. He then finds out she’s just been fired from that restaurant, and the two of them immediately go at it like dry tinder and a hot flame, inexplicably hook up, and move in together.

And the guy has his own place, the girl has hers, and they bounce between two fuck pads like crazy. Absolutely insane.

Later the protagonist introduces his fuckbuddy Hinata Chihiro to his company (looks like a software company), and they become coworkers.

The rest of the story is the two of them as colleagues, doing overtime together, doing 996 together. Wait, not 996—it’s the kind of brutal overtime where they regularly don’t get home until 2 a.m. and can’t even catch the live airing of new anime. They keep the relationship going, go from fuckbuddies to lovers, and eventually get married.

On paper it’s an inspiring story, but in practice it’s completely detached from reality.

In the game, the protagonist and heroine regularly come home after 2 a.m. overtime and still bang. They bang in the gaps during intense overtime. And worst of all, they come home on the weekend after overtime and bang some more.

Oh God. I’ve done overtime. The feeling when you get home is that you want to bang absolutely not. I have almost zero libido. I have no idea how the protagonist and heroine in this game pull it off. The only person on this planet I know who can maintain high-intensity overtime and a vigorous libido is “Xu Zijing.” Everyone else, never met one.

And for an office romance, the game doesn’t even try to hide it—they’re flirting right there in the office. Is that really okay?

Setting aside that most of what this game depicts is just content, the way it cuts back and forth between brutal overtime and brutal sex is something I just can’t wrap my head around.

I know most otaku are corporate drones, exhausted from work every day, no time for romance. A game like this exists to fulfill a whole set of fantasies: fantasizing about a chance encounter outside of work, and that encounter turning into something real, completing your life.

But it still feels off to me. The scriptwriter for this little nukige is the same guy from SMEE, and within a half-real, half-fake view of romance, he presents a fake urban love story full of sex. Maybe in the game’s world, Hinata Chihiro and the protagonist can squeeze in lust between the cracks.

In reality, the protagonist and Hinata Chihiro face high-pressure work, and just staying alive takes everything they’ve got. They’ve long since become walking corpses with zero libido.

Otherwise, why do you think Japan’s birth rate is so low?