An actor starring in a show, and writing the song that ends it, doesn’t happen often. Riho Sayashi just did exactly that. She’s the lead in a new drama adapted from a manga that’s already sold over a million copies and racked up 100 million views online, and when its second teaser dropped, she’d written the song running under it herself.
Riho Sayashi stars in “付き合ってあげてもいいかな How Do We Relationship?”, the live-action adaptation of Tamifull‘s hit manga, premiering 10 September on MBS. The announcement alone made it a genuine talking point at home and abroad, and its first teaser trended on X within hours. Its second, darker and more emotionally direct than the first, just arrived, built specifically to sit alongside that same song: “幸福失格 Koufuku Shikkaku“, the drama’s ending theme.
“幸福失格 Koufuku Shikkaku” is an emotionally intense song about falling in love after convincing yourself happiness was never meant for you. It follows a narrator who’s grown used to loneliness and a quietly imperfect kind of contentment, until someone she genuinely loves disrupts that carefully controlled world. She knows loving this person could pull her back into her own emotional “hell”, but she can no longer deny what she feels. With dark, vulnerable lyrics and a bittersweet view of love, the song sits inside the tension between wanting to be loved and fearing real happiness, ultimately asking whether even a painful love is worth choosing, as long as there’s someone to share it with.
Writing the words that close out your own story is a different task from acting one out. It raises a real question: how closely does the emotion in her lyrics end up tracking the character she’s also playing on screen?
The track comes from Sayashi’s upcoming EP “OWN”, dropping on 2 September, with lead single “I AM” already streaming since 19 August. The EP arrives in two formats, a limited-edition mini-album with Blu-ray, and a standard mini-album, both including a photobook, stickers, and a run of retailer-exclusive bonuses while stocks last.
“付き合ってあげてもいいかな How Do We Relationship?” premieres 10 September on MBS, running eight 24-minute episodes, with staggered broadcasts across regional networks through mid-September. The series streams internationally on GagaOOLala worldwide (excluding Japan and South Korea), Heavenly in South Korea, with an exclusive unlimited run on FOD in Japan, friDay in Taiwan, and one week of catch-up streaming via TVer.