A Japanese Curry for Lonely Men Comes with a Fake Girlfriend

Loneliness is a big issue in Japan.

A quarter of men over the age of 30 are virgins. Hugging chairs, robot restaurants, and rent-a-friend programs all exist to lighten the load of Japan's famously undersexed population.

But for young men in Japan with comorbid longings for companionship and food, there is a simple solution and it doesn't even require leaving them to leave their apartments. That's because novelty book shop Village Vanguard has released a microwave curry dish called Men's Delusion Curry–Orange Flavor Featuring Mao Harada, which satiates both of those appetites at the same time.

After popping the curry dish in the microwave, diners can pop an attached DVD into their computers and watch a video of 27-year-old gurabia model Mao Harada pretending to be their girlfriend and dining companion.

That's right—for those who are unable to deal with the existential angst of eating microwave dinners alone, a well-endowed gurabia model can pretend to be one of three roles. Depending on which chapter viewers choose, Mao Harada can play the "younger girlfriend," "the older girl who lives next door and is sort of risqué," or the tamer "Haradan Makes a Home-Cooked Meal."

While the combination of curry and oranges sounds weird, the film's star Mao Harada does hail from the Ehime Prefecture, which is one of Japan's top producers of oranges. But, as RocketNews24 points out: "We're not sure how well citrus fruit actually goes with the spicy sweet flavors of Japanese curry, but if we're being completely honest, the flavor of the curry itself probably isn't the primary selling point here."

As fate would have it, curry is the perfect dish for lonely men. Among the dishes named in a recent survey asking men to list the top ten dishes that they want their girlfriends to cook for them, all were heavy and hearty, but curry topped the list.

And while it's well-known that food, especially fatty food, can temporarily fill the void of loneliness, it's hardly a permanent solution. Just ask the millions of Chinese who crush fried dough on Singles Day, or the hordes of South Koreans who binge on black beans on Black Day. There ain't no cure for no love.