Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! and the toxic workplace

Major Spoilers for Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko!

Office romances are a staple of rom-coms, and plenty of yuri series—from quiet and heartfelt slow-burn stories, like Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, to more steamy and scandalous one-shots, like I Love You So Much I Hate You—revolve around colleagues falling in love at work. Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! is another addition to this genre, following our protagonist Ayaka as she pursues a relationship with her older coworker Hiroko, despite Hiroko’s initial insistence that she can’t date someone she works with. In romances like this, sometimes the office is merely a backdrop, but in Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko!, the corporate environment and its more toxic elements are integral to both the relationship and its supposed happy ending. While toxic workplace culture is originally presented as something that’s keeping the couple apart, ultimately the narrative ends up reinforcing it, asserting that finding happiness in love and expressing your own queer identity are less important than maintaining a conservative, capitalistic status quo. 

When I first picked up Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko, I didn’t expect the workplace to factor so much into their relationship, but when you consider Japan and its infamous workplace culture, it’s understandable. Japanese offices are reportedly riddled with prejudices and harassment while demanding overtime from their employees, and the one portrayed in this manga is no different. When that became clear to me, I assumed the ending of this manga would be Ayaka and Hiroko choosing love over work, happiness over misplaced loyalty to the company. However, the ending of Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! heads in a different direction altogether by simply staying in place: Ayaka and Hiroko choose to stay together as the office’s “open secret” so that they can both keep their jobs. They live together outside of work, and neither confirm nor deny their relationship status during work hours. It’s a neat ending that technically ends happily for everyone involved, Ayaka, Hiroko, and coworkers included. 

The “happy” ending of Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! reflects the real-world fact  that despite a societal shift towards LGBTQIA+ acceptance in Japan, actual queer people are still expected to hide their authentic selves for the greater good. The manga’s conclusion presents the open secret of Hiroko and Ayaka’s relationship as a valid way for them to be together, not because it is a choice they freely make, but because it is the option that preserves the conservative dynamic of their workplace.

Like many toxic workplaces, the office in this manga seems friendly and inviting at a surface level. However, as we see in Chapter 12, this is because Ayaka and Hiroko’s office fosters a “one big happy family” dynamic that makes employees feel at ease, while also subtly pressuring them into overtime and unpaid activities outside of work. Before the start of the manga, Ayaka is an employee who finishes her work at 6PM on the dot and immediately leaves the office. The manga portrays her as being uptight and impersonal for this behavior—she wears glasses, ties up her hair, and wears suits. That is, until she makes a mistake in the office, one that causes her and her coworkers to work overtime. The office seems to have a “what can you do” attitude towards overtime, something that they do unquestioningly in order to accomplish the job as a team, no matter how many hours it might take them.

Ayaka takes responsibility for her mistake and quickly helps them with the work, which also ends up helping her become friendly with her coworkers. No one is angry with her; they’re only relieved that they can finally go home. Giving more to the company, whether it be your time or your emotional availability, as well as bonding with your coworkers through that collective exploitation, creates an office culture where boundaries between Ayaka’s work and personal life begin to erode. In the present, we see Ayaka in casual clothes, her hair down, glasses gone, gladly working overtime to support her coworkers, no matter what. While the manga presents this change in a positive light, it plays into the “big happy family” dynamic that many workplaces use to manipulate their employees into free labor. Japanese office culture, in particular, is infamous for guilting employees into it.

Ayaka also feels misunderstood by her coworkers, partly because of their ignorance about the queer community. In Chapter 19, after Ayaka publicly declares her love for Hiroko in the middle of the workday, she finds that her coworkers are eager to vocalize their support for her. They tell both Ayaka and each other that LGBT people are more common these days, so it’s not strange that Ayaka is a lesbian. They congratulate her for being brave enough to come out, and they tell her that they’ll help her get Hiroko to return her feelings. But Risa, another lesbian colleague, feels something off about the tone of their support, which Ayaka points out is because none of their coworkers actually voiced support for Ayaka herself. They talked about being excited to see “this kind of couple” up close, because they see a man wooing a woman all the time. Supporting Ayaka in breaking the conventional norm spices up everyday work! Underneath the initial enthusiastic support, we see a performative show of allyship for their own benefit, not for Ayaka’s, and therefore, not a true show of support for her as a person. 

More overtly, sexism makes this office undoubtedly hostile for its employees—particularly for women, doubly so for Ayaka and Hiroko as lesbians. In Chapter 15, we read about Hiroko’s first love, Chinatsu, who was her own superior when she was just a new hire. Chinatsu is being considered as the next head of their department, something that the men in their company don’t care for. When she and Hiroko are spotted holding hands by their male coworker, he immediately spreads a rumor that Chinatsu is sleeping with her coworkers in order to secure a promotion. Chinatsu ultimately resigns after this, leaving Hiroko on at the company, where she eventually rises through the ranks herself—by compulsively going along with the microaggressions and sexist comments of her superiors.

Drinking at a bar with some executives, Hiroko must dodge direct questions about her dating life, while these much older men give their opinions about other, younger female coworkers, such as Ayaka. These men talk about how Ayaka’s crush on Hiroko is fine “for now” because she is young and doesn’t have to get married yet. But they assume that she’ll grow out of lesbianism soon enough—and Hiroko laughs it off, as any closeted person might in the same situation. Afterwards, a coworker remarks that Hiroko shouldn’t be so passive during these drinking sessions; but Hiroko, as we see throughout the manga, is incredibly aware of her sensitive position. She reasons to herself that playing along makes her appear straight. 

Throughout the manga, Hiroko adamantly rejects Ayaka’s advances, believing that it would only put a target on their backs at work. At the same time, the manga continues to prove that Hiroko is right—being a lesbian, being a woman, being someone who deprioritizes work in their life, does not work for this office culture. Dating Ayaka is like wrapping all three of those into a neat bomb to detonate over her career. So what finally convinces her?

In Chapter 23, Ayaka confesses to Hiroko for the last time. She finally understands the story around Chinatsu and Hiroko—however, what she understands about that story is that people caused Chinatsu to resign, not an overarching office system that worked against her. The actual people that Chinatsu worked with have since resigned, and therefore, Ayaka reasons, Hiroko has no reason to be afraid of dating her now. Their coworkers have always been supportive at work, so why wouldn’t they support the two of them being together? 

Ayaka falsely equalizes coworker support at work as support for them as lesbians, but this is what finally causes Hiroko to accept her feelings. The fact that the opinion of their coworkers is, ultimately, the crux of this couple’s conflict, speaks to an office culture mentality that work is just as important as every other facet of your life, including love. People may not actually feel that way, deep down, but it is a certain social conditioning that is sharply apparent throughout this manga, especially in the climax confession. Their feelings towards each other and the feelings of their coworkers are equally important and must be considered before they become a couple. The only way to really do that, without radically changing their toxic workplace, is for them to become the office’s “open secret.”

However, Ayaka and Hiroko can only keep this status in the office as long as their coworkers continue to approve and support them. The safety of their relationship—and by extension, the two of them—depends on other people, rather than a system that should be keeping them safe already. Instead of re-examining the corporate culture that makes this “open secret” necessary, Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! repeats the tired cycle of blaming individuals for workplace problems, instead of the larger corporate culture at work. In the last chapter, we see how this plays out in their “happy” ending, with their coworkers deflecting questions from new hires about why Ayaka and Hiroko are so close. The implication of this scene is that the “open secret” depends on things entirely outside of their control, such as keeping the same coworkers, new coworkers accepting the open secret, higher-ups never finding out about them. All of these things cannot be depended upon to remain consistent at work, because as employees, Ayaka and Hiroko fundamentally have little power over their work environment. Yet Ayaka states that she’ll gladly keep their relationship a secret forever, as long as she gets Hiroko to herself outside of work. 

However, as we have been shown throughout the manga, work is everything to them. It is the central setting of the manga, and we hardly ever see the two main characters outside of it, besides a lesbian bar they both go to. Times are changing, of course, but protections often come down to the goodwill of individual companies rather than strong legal protections. Outside of work, you can do whatever you want, but when work takes up all of your daytime hours, how much time does that really leave you to live your life how you want to? So it is difficult to believe, when Ayaka says she’s happy with this arrangement, that she’ll be happy with it forever. 

This manga has a happy for now ending. It’s a hopeful ending, but it’s also the best-case scenario in the strict conditions they’re trapped in. It is ultimately a story about lesbians navigating Japanese office culture, and I think the conclusion of this manga basically says: well, they can’t! They can be diligent, hardworking employees the same as everyone else, but they can never be completely honest about their authentic selves for most of their daily life, and making that sacrifice is imperative for the harmony of the group. It’s a “happy ending” that painfully demonstrates what so many LGBTQIA+ people grow up being taught: hide what you love, and we won’t reject you. Keep your love hidden, and the world will keep functioning as normal.

Despite being a queer love story, Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! still conforms to the general capitalistic expectations around work, and therefore, still reflects the current social norms in Japan. In the eyes of Japanese society, Hiroko and Ayaka are basically the ideal lesbian couple—model employees during their work hours and only explicitly gay after-hours. They are committed to staying together, while taking care to never rock the boat at work. Ideal lesbians are subversive capitalists, but they are still capitalists, at the end of the day. At least, that is what the ending of Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! seems to teach us.