Otokonoko Is Profitable
The maid cafe.
It was the very essence of underground culture, and its birthplace was Japan, the undisputed capital of subculture.
A host club for otaku?
If you had to explain it to someone who didn’t really know, that wasn’t a bad way to put it.
Women in maid uniforms would take orders and serve food and drinks, acting out a concept like they were roleplaying for fun.
They even offered fan service like photo ops, and since it was a cafe, they did sell food and drinks, but it was closer to a place where you went to play with maids straight out of subculture fiction.
You could think of it as a playground for nerds, and what had once seemed like a bizarre novelty eventually crossed the sea and landed in Korea.
Otakus are profitable.
As if to prove it, maid cafes kept doing well, no matter how strangely ordinary people looked at them.
And as time passed, and anything that did well in Korea soon spawned copycat businesses everywhere, maid cafes had become a red ocean too.
The era when just being a maid cafe was enough to prove your uniqueness and charm was long over.
Now, a maid cafe had to have something special about that cafe in particular.
Maybe the girls ended every sentence with “-nyan,” or maybe they added moe traits like animal ears to the maid cosplay.
It had become an age where a cafe couldn’t survive unless it struggled desperately to differentiate itself.
The pool of otaku was limited, while the competition just kept multiplying. It was only natural.
And sometimes, in a reckless attempt to stand out, even the regulars who had stuck around would vanish in droves…
“This isn’t going to work.”
Lee Jiho, who had opened one of the earliest maid cafes in Korea, felt the same way.
He had gotten anxious over the growing number of rivals and taken a desperate gamble, only for the cafe’s overly changed concept to drive away the customers who used to come all the time.
The very move he had made to break out of the crisis of rising competition had instead started to strangle him, and though he had managed to avoid outright collapse by quickly returning the cafe to its original concept, the damage was severe.
Lee Jiho kept agonizing over how to repair that damage and somehow turn the cafe back into a booming business that could stand against the newcomers.
In this world, if you didn’t keep trying new things, you wouldn’t just stay in place—you’d be buried.
He had to keep developing something that would satisfy an otaku’s moe.
“We need an attractive maid.”
No matter how much he thought about it, the core of a maid cafe was still the “maid.”
Delicious food? Tasty drinks?
Honestly, how many people came to a maid cafe expecting that sort of thing?
The only reason they could charge outrageous prices for food that was merely decent was the maids themselves.
Just as a platform’s value is ultimately determined by its content, the heart of a maid cafe was its maids, and to find those crucial maid part-timers, Lee Jiho had sharpened his eyes and gone hunting for talent.
By default, maid cafe part-time work paid well.
That was true of almost all service jobs, but especially maid cafes, since dealing with people was such a pain in the ass.
If you were going to work hard, smiling sweetly and killing off your own dignity in the process, you deserved a fat paycheck for it.
The problem was that, even if the pay was good, few people wanted to work at a maid cafe—just like any other job everyone avoided.
Come to think of it, that wasn’t strange at all. Flirting, fawning, and catering to otaku wasn’t exactly normal work.
Then again, he couldn’t just hire anybody as a maid.
You needed at least decent looks, some patience, and the ability to do things like ketchup art.
He could teach the technical stuff, sure, but looks were not something you could teach, and that made finding maid part-timers no easy matter.
If someone had the looks to work at a maid cafe, they could just do a regular customer service job instead.
Especially with other rival businesses in the picture, Lee Jiho had once again gone home empty-handed after trying to recruit part-timers all day.
This is bad.
In the current situation, even one person taking a sick day or missing work for any reason would throw off the rotation.
Should I raise the pay? ...No, no. We’re already stretched thin.
He didn’t even need some exceptional, S-rank maid part-timer. A normal A-rank would be enough, and yet even that was nowhere to be found in this labor market. All he could do was sigh.
Maybe I should just switch to a butler cafe right now—
Just as Lee Jiho was seriously drowning in that line of thought—
“Excuse me. I came because I saw the flyer about hiring part-timers.”
Dong.
The doorbell rang, and an angel appeared there.
Such a petite body that “legal loli” would fit perfectly.
Delicately beautiful features.
A boyish short haircut.
A neutral voice.
The moment Lee Jiho saw him, it felt like lightning flashed through his brain.
A boyish maid...!
The concept that would save the cafe had just been decided.
A tomboy maid cafe.
And for that, Lee Jiho—
“Hired!”
Without asking a single question, he shouted that the gold nugget that had walked in on its own was hired.
The angel who had come looking for a part-time job, Lee Harang, wore a bewildered expression.
“Are you the owner?”
“That’s right. I’m Lee Jiho, owner of this maid cafe.”
“Ah, but I—”
He hadn’t expected the owner to be there right away.
Thinking things had worked out nicely, Lee Harang was about to explain his situation and ask whether it would still be okay, but Lee Jiho, already too worked up, barreled on without listening.
“A short-term part-time job is fine too. If the pay isn’t to your liking, we can adjust it together. Or is it the hours that are the problem?”
“Well, that’s not—”
“I’ll fit everything to you! You can even just come in on weekends and work a little. Please…!”
As if he couldn’t bear to lose him, Lee Jiho threw out every possible favorable condition and flailed around trying to hire him.
Harang understood the desperation, but because he kept getting interrupted, irritation was starting to rise in him.
Let me talk too!
Still, he forced himself to stay patient, calmed down, and said what he needed to say to the overexcited Lee Jiho.
“I came to do internet broadcasting….”
After all, he was only here to earn money for soundproofing equipment.
So he planned to do it for two or three months at most and then quit, and maybe viewers would even come to the cafe just to see him.
Was that okay?
To that question, Lee Jiho naturally said yes.
Viewers coming to the cafe?
That would be even better!
There was no reason to turn away customers.
Even if they came, didn’t order anything, and just looked around before leaving, that was still fine.
It would only help the store feel like a place that was drawing crowds.
His determination to not let this one slip away only grew stronger.
He wasn’t an S-rank talent. He was SS-rank.
Lee Jiho was grinning from ear to ear when—
“Um... this is the most important part.”
“Is there still more? Go ahead, speak freely.”
He was already prepared to say that if Harang hadn’t brought a resume or something, it was fine.
That face was the resume.
But what came next was enough to freeze Lee Jiho’s brain solid.
“I’m a guy.”
“.........Huh?”
For a moment, Lee Jiho thought he must have misheard, and his brain flatly refused to understand what he was hearing.
A guy?
...What does that mean?
Was it some slang kids used these days?
Surely he couldn’t mean his gender was male.
“Ah.”
After a brief bout of confusion, Lee Jiho came back to his senses.
“Our cafe respects the part-timer’s gender identity.”
It was a statement bursting with all the right gender-sensitivity energy, but it had missed the mark completely.
“Haah....”
With the expression of someone who had seen this coming, Harang let out a sigh and fished out his ID card to show him.
“Male. Man. In English, it’s ‘man.’”
Female body.
Male mind.
Not that.
He was just boldly presenting identification proving that both his body and mind were male.
And seeing that, Lee Jiho didn’t calm down so much as plunge into an even greater chaos.
Male? With that face... male?
He was a picture-perfect beautiful girl.
A beautiful girl who looked like she’d leapt right out of a manga.
The kind of face that would make any man on the street, ten out of ten or a hundred out of a hundred, turn to look.
With a face so cute and beautiful that it seemed impossible for it to exist in the real world... male?
Everyone had different tastes, sure, but this was a face no one could deny was beautiful—yet he was a man!
“Why...?”
Without meaning to, Lee Jiho muttered it aloud.
What a tragedy.
The only explanation that came to mind was that this was heaven’s own cruel joke, played on him for being a man.
Still, that wasn’t what mattered right now.
No, it was pretty important, but there was something even more urgent.
“Hmm... It’s fine. A femboy maid is the kind of thing those otaku—no, I mean, the customers will absolutely love.”
What mattered was that he absolutely could not let this born talent walk away.
The changing room issue and things like that were a little troublesome, but that was fine.
He could just set up a separate room, and as for dealing with customers, he could post an advance notice so nobody could complain about being misled.
In fact, most people would probably find it fascinating and love it, and even those who didn’t would just shrug and go, “Oh, that kind of concept?”
“Actually, let me ask you this: are you sure you’re okay with it? I mean, you’d have to cross-dress and flirt with men…”
“Ha, haha...”
Harang had almost forgotten about it, but the moment Jiho pointed it out, he pictured the scene again, and his cheek twitched.
“I’m prepared. It was decided because of the broadcast, so... I can’t exactly not do it.”
“I see.”
Well, if I think of it as practicing reactions for streaming, it’s not actually that unpleasant.
At first, the idea of fawning over a bunch of guys with the same equipment down there had been repulsive just to imagine. But once he thought about using it on stream later, it felt different.
You should use every weapon you have.
The brutal world of internet broadcasting.
If he wanted to swim through that blood ocean and grow fat off the blood others shed, then he had to do everything he could.
As long as he wasn’t committing crimes or piling up karma, it would be stranger not to do it.
That was what his sworn sister Kang Yura had once said while giving advice to newbie streamers, so he ought to follow that teaching.
“When can you start coming in?”
Lee Jiho’s question was already full of thoughts about using the powerful joker called Lee Harang to breathe life back into the cafe.
Harang answered that he could start tomorrow.
However, he wanted to focus on internet broadcasting at night, so he’d like to leave before dinner.
“I can come in on weekdays or weekends, no problem, but I’d appreciate it if you could stick to the leaving time.”
“Of course!”
Smiling brightly, Lee Jiho nodded.
They took last orders at 8 p.m. and stayed open until 9, but there were plenty of people who left before then anyway.
He laughed as if those conditions were nothing at all, and yet—
“H-Harang! Please, please, I’m begging you—couldn’t you at least work full-time on weekends?!”
That smile was shattered in the very first week after Harang started working.
He was popular.
The number of customers specifically asking for Harang was... way, way too many.
The appearance of a femboy maid!
People were swarming in just to catch a glimpse, and the cafe looked ready to burst at the seams.
It was sucking in nearby otaku like some kind of absorption technique.
At this rate, they simply couldn’t handle the flood of demand.
And so Lee Jiho had ended up clutching at Harang’s pant leg and begging.