Yuri Is My Job!

Episodes 1-3

When it comes down to it, the setting is the true star of Yuri Is My Job!. What we have here is a café where everyone, from the staff to the customers are immersing themselves in a massive game of pretend. When you walk through the front door, you are not a customer at a local Tokyo café but rather the student-run café at the yuri-tastic Liebe Girls Academy. There you are treated to small snippets of the girls' romantic lives as they find themselves stumbling into various romantic situations in between taking orders and serving food. It's basically an improv stage show with an ongoing plot—and one you need to come and watch regularly if you don't want to miss out on all the juicy developments.

But more than just being a unique setting, it's also vital for the story being told. All too often, settings are interchangeable. You can take a samurai story and put it in the wild west and it will still work (e.g., The Magnificent Seven). You can take a fantasy story and set it in space and get a genre-defining work (e.g., Star Wars). However, with Yuri Is My Job!, the story doesn't really work without the improv café at its center.

This is because Hime is not an actress—at least, not like the other workers at the café. Mitsuki and Sumika are great improv actresses and have their parts as the kind-yet-strict onee-san and the teasing slacker senpai down pat. They know the typical yuri romance clichés inside and out and can play into them at the drop of a hat. However, this is not how they are in real life—just the roles they play when “on stage.”

Hime is largely unable to understand this—not because she's incapable of acting but because she spends her entire life “in character.” Hime suffers from the need to be liked by everyone. Thus, she is always acting like the cute innocent girl—and the one time we know of when she broke character, it basically ruined her elementary school life and caused her to be a social pariah. This was the turning point in her life, whether she realizes it or not. It was the moment when she could have chosen to live for herself rather than for the approval of others. However, she instead chose to double down to an insane degree, with only her best friend knowing about her true nature.

What Hime doesn't realize is that Mitsuki is a professional actress. She saw through Hime's cute act the moment she walked through the door. However, Hime having this façade is a good thing—a pure, innocent character is a perfect fit for the café after all. Hime, however, believes that anyone able to see through her is an enemy that would be out to ostracize her. And as the staffs haven't shunned her, she believes her secret is safe—which makes Mitsuki's actions even weirder to her.

On Mitsuki's side of things, she is dealing with this acting amateur coming in and derailing the café's plot and forcing her character into a romantic subplot without any prior discussion. Worse yet, while this girl is a decent actress, she's a terrible café worker. Mitsuki has her own job to take care of and the last thing she wants is to be responsible for the newbie—covering her mistakes both in and out of character.

The vast majority of their rocky relationship in these first few episodes comes from the disconnect between what is true and what they believe to be true about each other—until the cliffhanger at the end of episode 3. Now everything is cleared up between them—if only it had happened in a way that didn't result in making things even more uncomfortable on a deeply personal level for both of them.

Episode 1 Rating:
Episode 2 Rating:
Episode 3 Rating:

Random Thoughts:

• Honestly, this kind of audience-inclusion improv/soap opera café is a million-dollar idea. If these really exist, I'm going to find one and check it out.

• I wonder if Mitsuki, Sumika, and Mai just think Hime is some kind of hardcore method actor and that's why she never drops character around them.

• The thing I don't understand is how Kanoko got Hime to lower her façade after what happened with Mitsuki in elementary school.

• Three full-time actors/café staff really doesn't seem like enough to do all that needs doing—even for a café that size.

Yuri Is My Job! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.