“Excuse me,” began the direct message on Twitter, “I may have sex today so could you send me a message at 12 to tell me to cut my nails?” The question wasn’t aimed at a lover, but at Shoji Morimoto, a thirtysomething living in Tokyo who, since 2018, had been offering himself “for rent”. His services involve hanging around clients – watching them, eating with them, mostly listening rather than talking to them. Is this work? He called himself Rental Person Who Does Nothing. News outlets inside and outside Japan rushed to profile him. His story inspired a manga and a television series.
Now, Morimoto has written a memoir that’s neither written (he merely responded to questions posed to him by “S” who, he says, “is not a particular fan of Rental Person”) nor a memoir (it’s about his professional persona more than himself). Rather, it’s a partial inventory of the requests he received and chose to accept. Most are mesmerisingly banal. Someone wants to send him a photo of her pet and have him reply: “That is unbelievably cute!” A worker who’s just lost their job for the 10th time would like to sit and eat a hamburger with him.
Morimoto serves many functions. He’s an ergonomic tool for the lazy writer who says he’ll never finish an assignment unless he’s being watched. He’s an incentiviser for the marathon runner who believes he’ll run quicker if he knows there’s someone waiting for him at the finishing line. He’s an alibi for someone who’d like to sit in the park in the evening breeze with a can of chūhai but suspects it would be weird to drink alone. His anonymity can be arousing: he turns down an offer of sex only to receive a message: “‘Get a job then, dickhead!’ I wasn’t too pleased about that.”
What is Morimoto doing? He insists that he doesn’t dispense life advice to his clients (that would be “doing something” – a category error). He rarely meets them more than once and is involved rather than implicated in their lives. He says he’s happy to have “only the flimsiest connections” with them. It might be possible to describe his work, in today’s corporate jargon, as an example of “active listening”; he, though, would demur – “When I listen, it is always in a passive way. I’m not doing anything.” At one point he distinguishes himself from a copyist named Do-anything-at-all: “Apparently, he’s already given up, because he only got requests for day labour.”
In the first half of the book Morimoto seems to have given up, too. If there’s one thing worse than listening to people recount their dreams, it’s reading verbatim tweets they’ve sent or received. The writing is flat, bloggy, affectless. Perhaps this is intentional. Morimoto insists he doesn’t have much of a personality, that he sees himself as a neutral figure in a crowd. When he does reach for metaphors, the results are joltingly odd: pondering if his do-nothing service can have a catalytic effect on clients, he goes full chemistry and likens them to hydrogen peroxide and himself to manganese peroxide. Later, claiming that because he doesn’t say much his clients develop their own idea of what he’s thinking, he essays a comparison to peacocks and jewel beetles who have structural rather than fixed colours.
Over time, biographical details do emerge. Morimoto’s older brother failed his university exams, became depressed, and, although over 40, had never been able to work. His older sister was unable to find the kind of job she craved and ended up killing herself. He studied earthquakes at graduate school, but wound up as a freelance writer producing copy for business pamphlets. His boss told him that he lacked a strong personality and chided him when, at after-hours drinks, he sat alone in silence. At work, his company wanted to outsource simple tasks and have staff focus on creative, high-level projects – “I’m afraid I couldn’t come up with any useful ideas at all.”
Three cheers for Morimoto! What he’s resisting is, in the language of the late David Graeber, bullshit jobs. Upspeak, self-assessment, box-ticking, pompous mission statements, bogus invocations of teamwork and community: bullshit, all of it. “I’d like the world to be one where even if people can’t do anything for others,” he writes, “even if they can make no contribution to society, they can still live stress-free lives.” In Japan, where the culture of what has been called “excess reciprocation” (where “someone receiving a gift will try to reciprocate with a gift of greater value”) is still common, stress permeates waking hours.
Morimoto may describe himself as “living without doing anything”, but that doesn’t stop him from emerging as a semi-accidental painter of modern life. The most poignant service he provides involves a young woman whose grandmother died the very day she flew out of Tokyo to study abroad. Now, after a year away, she is returning. “I’ll be feeling sad when I arrive,” she messages Morimoto, “so it would be nice to have someone waving at me when I get to the airport.”
The two of them go to a karaoke box where she sings and talks about her gran, fondly remembering her generosity when it came to dishing out ice-creams. At first she’s cheery. Then she admits she can’t tell friends how sad she felt about not being able to attend the funeral. She starts to cry. It’s a quietly devastating vignette that’s redolent of a Hirokazu Kore-eda film.
Rental Person Who Does Nothing starts slowly, seemingly fluff, an attempt to get more mileage out of a fleeting internet story. By its close, Morimoto, though still elusive, emerges as a modern Bartleby, an inadvertent dissident, someone who has come to see his practice as being “about enjoying the absurdity of swimming against the tide of efficiency”.
• Rental Person Who Does Nothing: The True Adventures of Japan’s Rental Person by Shoji Morimoto and translated by Don Knotting is published by Picador (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
