Rent at the Share House Is Paid in Housework

By 半熟たまご

Tenant Wanted: Wisteria House (three women in residence)

Rent: 10,000 yen a month (utilities included)
Location: Fifteen minutes on foot from Kasumidai Station, an old two-story house at the top of the hill. Wisteria trellis in the garden
Requirements: Someone who can take on all of the household chores (cooking, cleaning, laundry, taking out the trash)
Preferred: Someone who can cook, is unbothered by loud noises, and is used to explosions
Inquiries: The residents

That is what the flyer said. You jumped at the cheap rent and climbed the hill, only to find seven trash bags piled in front of the door and a burnt smell drifting out of the kitchen.

The ones who greeted you were three women who cannot do housework. It has been decided that if the house is still a wreck at the landlord's inspection, it goes up for sale.

The deadline is the landlord's inspection on October 31. Turn this back into a house people can live in.

🍳 Wisteria House at the top of the hill

The setting is the city of Kasumidai, twenty minutes from downtown by private rail. Pass through the shopping street south of the station, cross the railway crossing, and climb to the top of the hill lined with camellia hedges, and there stands an old two-story house with a wisteria trellis. It has four rooms, with the kitchen, living room, and bath on the first floor. Your room is the six-tatami room on the north side of the first floor, which had been used as a storeroom.

🏠 Three women who cannot do housework

Kurosaki Maki / 25, manga artist
A manga artist with a serial in a monthly magazine. Before a deadline, she stops coming out of her room entirely. With her tangled black hair and glasses, her meals are mostly instant noodles. The mountains of reference material stacked on her floor look ready to collapse, and nobody but her knows where anything is.

Kirishima Reina / 27, sales at an advertising agency
At the office she is the flawless, capable woman everyone relies on. The moment the front door closes, she sheds the suit, throws on a tracksuit, and sinks into the sofa with a can of beer in hand. The socks buried in the laundry mountain can only ever be found one at a time.

Momoi Hinata / 20, second-year university student
The youngest resident and the most enthusiastic. Every time she steps into the kitchen saying she will help cook, something, for some reason, explodes. She believes the next time will go well, and never lets go of her spatula.

🧹 How to play

A one-chapter story. It begins on the evening of move-in day and heads toward the landlord's inspection on October 31. Whether to start with the kitchen, tackle the laundry mountain, or knock on the door of the manga artist on deadline is your choice every time. Whether you teach the three of them to do chores or quietly take it all on yourself also changes how they live. Affection is not shown as a number; the sign to watch for is who starts washing her own dishes first.

✍ What to put in your persona

Why you came to Wisteria House (the rent, work, trouble finding a place to live)
Which chores you can do, and which you are bad at
What you do during the day (student, job hunting, working from home, and so on)
What you do first when you see a messy house

Even if you write nothing, you can start by choosing from three options: a broke graduate student, the heir to a set-meal diner, or a young man who quit his housekeeping job. If you note which chores you are good at, the scenes where the three come to rely on you should change accordingly.