Rio (Sasaki Nozumi) is a pretty immoral teenager. Not only does she rake in the cash dating sugar daddies who shower her with gifts, credit cards and a serviced apartment in the city, but she also bribes and blackmails other students into bullying & recruiting new girls to join her little gang of compensated daters. Rio also dabbles willingly in recreational lesbianism for the right chunk of change even when she knows that, for the client in question (a fellow classmate), it is true love. Everything changes, however, when her photos are accidentally mixed up with those of Kouki (Tanihara Shosuke), a bashful thirty-something university lecturer whom she instantly falls for.

Their paths had actually crossed before, a few years previously at the local hospital, where in the film’s opening scene, Kouki is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. By the time the couple are formally introduced and Rio decides to quit her affluent life of casual whoring to study history with her beloved professor, he has but a few weeks to live. Not that he can bring himself to tell her, of course. As their romance develops and Rio changes her life for the better, tragedy looms on the horizon, threatening to send Rio spiraling back into her life of vice – or even worse.

Adapted from a notorious cell phone novel by first-time writer director Kantake Yuri, My Rainy Days manages to be strangely beguiling, despite its almost flippantly amoral stance and wholly conventional romantic story arc. Full credit for this must be awarded to Sasaki Nozumi’s rather excellent central performance, who turns what could have been a wholly reprehensible character into a genuinely sympathetic one, whether playing Rio as overwhelmingly cute or the manipulative ice queen.

While no one needs a lecture on the wrongness of compensated dating, here it is regarded as nothing more than a lucrative after-school activity, promising good living and fun nights on the town with precious few repercussions. The film’s nonchalant attitude to this all-too-popular trend is shocking in the way it is so downplayed. The girls’ devil-may-care attitude is not flaunted brazenly in the viewers’ faces as a cautionary tale we must all learn from, merely documented in the same matter-of-fact manner along with the rest of their daily routine.

As such My Rainy Days feels to some degree like a teenage version of Sex And The City (particularly the later, less incisive additions to the franchise), where sex, dating, shopping and luxurious lifestyles are all par for the course and precious little time is spent examining how these things might not always be in the best interests of these young impressionable women. Rio chooses to give up her life of excess and debauchery not because it is wrong or potentially very dangerous, but simply to pursue a meaningful relationship for the first time. While this is in no way the wrong message for the film to be extolling, it does fail to address the larger problem to hand.