Once a week, high schooler Shiori Miyagi pays her classmate Hazuki Sendai five thousand yen to make the girl follow her orders for the afternoon. Their sessions start with normal activities like snacking and chatting…until a mood strikes Miyagi, and she gives Sendai commands that veer into risky territory. No matter the order, Sendai follows, even if it means licking Miyagi's feet. Yet after half a year of engaging in this secret dynamic, neither girl calls the other a friend. So what does that make them? And with their last year in high school looming, is their relationship doomed to crumble?

Buying a Classmate Once a Week: Our Time Together and the Five-Thousand-Yen Excuse has a story by Usa Haneda and art by U35. English translation is done by Jennifer Ward. Published by Yen On (October 13, 2026).

Lauren Orsini
Rating:

When my kid was a baby, he went through a brief but memorable toe-sucking phase. Whenever he was crawling about, an unsuspecting, sockless victim might get an unpleasant surprise. I forgot about it until I was reading Buying a Classmate Once a Week. Not only does this book have multiple scenes of foot licking and toe sucking, but each one repeatedly emphasizes how gross and weird it feels. I'm not into feet (though I will defend foot fetishists' rights until my dying breath), but isn't foot stuff supposed to be fun? This book doth protest too much, repeating how little fun its romantic leads are having until I can practically taste the lukewarm, clammy taste of foot flesh and all I can think about is how pruny these girls must be getting. But the foot stuff is just the most repeated example of this duo's after-school power plays, a BDSM dynamic in which two girls turn their usual social hierarchy on its head. Featuring two unreliable narrators who never miss a chance to deny their real feelings, this book, like feet, is an acquired taste.

With her average grades and middling popularity, Miyagi doesn't stand out in any way. But when popular girl Sendai forgets her wallet at the bookstore checkout, Miyagi rescues her with a crisp 5000 yen bill. Miyagi has a condition, though: instead of paying her back, she wants to order Sendai around. The two reach a peculiar agreement. Once a week, Miyagi texts Sendai to come over to her apartment and gives her 5000 yen at the door. Then, behind closed doors, Miyagi orders Sendai to read her manga to her or lick her foot. They exist in completely different worlds in public, never speaking at school. As they take turns narrating the novel, they each insist that they aren't interested in other women, that they aren't even friends. “You're a freak,” they repeatedly say to one another, even as they relish in pushing the envelope further with every encounter. Most of the book takes place in the electrically charged liminal space of Miyagi's deserted apartment. It's clear that they're both getting something out of this topsy-turvy dynamic, in which Miyagi, a social nobody, has the power to debase Sendai in any way she chooses. Sendai, for her part, seems to enjoy becoming increasingly uninhibited, freed from the confines of the good girl label she is compelled to wear at both school and home. Their games are just as much (or perhaps more so) about control as they are about sex. Though no actual sex occurs—these girls barely reach second base—the tense atmosphere of their transactional meetings makes it feel downright filthy.

I enjoyed the conceit that Buying a Classmate Once a Week set out to explore. It was a breath of fresh air to read a yuri light novel that exchanged the usual tooth-rotting fluff for a prickly dynamic designed to intentionally make the reader uncomfortable. But I did get caught up in that same discomfort, thinking about how unpleasant a lot of this must feel—especially as the leads narrated how much the finger and toe biting hurt, and how gross it felt. “Unpleasant” was in fact, a word Miyagi used more than once to describe their escapades. On a cerebral level, their BDSM dynamic was pretty hot. On a more sensory level, it wasn't my thing.

Erica Friedman
Rating:

When I was younger, New York City's Times Square was a den of iniquity. Bootleg VHS shops with the very best kung fu movies were shoved next to theaters that put on strip shows, shady “massage parlors,” men's clubs and bars, all of which had a specific kind of clientele, mostly men in trench coats, hats, and sunglasses. Crammed in between these were even smaller, even shadier, peep shows. Peep shows were comprised of a room in which a woman did something in various states of undress, with peep booths arranged around that room. In a booth, you put in the amount of money asked, and you look into the hole or viewer provided. The screen would pop open, and you could watch her do whatever for a specific amount of time, until the time ran out and the screen was covered.

I miss the days when TGIF wasn't the sleaziest thing in Times Square. I would never have imagined that a Light Novel made me think of them.

Buying a Classmate Once a Week: Our Time Together and the Five-Thousand-Yen Excuse is not just bad. It is the exact same level of sad and pathetic one feels about the people who you could see going in or out of peep shows. I sighed so often reading this, as it was no more than a primer for young people to learn how to become a porn voyeur. Nothing about this story makes sense; the characters are empty shells — Miyagi more than Sendai, but still rather empty. By the end of the book, I really don't know why either of them is doing this. I didn't care either. I had passed on reading this in Japanese, and now I know I was right. When the book ended, my single comment was “nope.”