Rental Person Who Does Nothing is a memoir about a project—or perhaps even an experiment—by Shoji Morimoto. Morimoto’s wife encountered a blog post by therapist and self-help writer Jinnosuke Kokoroya that insisted that “people have value even if they do nothing”. Morimoto began to wonder if that is really true. And, if it is true, whether society has space for people who “do nothing”. After all, he was used to his boss telling him things like, “it makes no difference whether you’re here or not,” and “you’re a permanent vacancy.”
So Morimoto opened a “Do-Nothing Rental Service” with a tweet, explaining
It’s available for any situation in which all you want is a person to be there. Maybe there’s a restaurant you want to go to, but you feel awkward going on your own. Maybe a game you want to play but you’re one person short. Or perhaps you’d like someone to keep a space in the park for your cherry blossom viewing party… I only charge transport [from the closest Tokyo Subway station] and the cost of food/drink (if applicable). I can’t do anything except give very simple responses.
The reaction was huge. Within ten months, Morimoto’s Twitter following went from 300 to over 100,000. Today, his following stretches to almost half a million.
Rental Person is presented as a memoir, though it pushes the genre’s boundaries.
Rental Person is presented as a memoir, though it pushes the genre’s boundaries in many ways, including its non-narrative structure. The book is ostensibly by Shoji Morimoto, but it, too, is a product of Morimoto’s “doing nothing”. As he explains in the book’s forward, he would have found it “tough to come up with a convincing book.” Instead, another author and editor asked him questions. He provided “very simple responses”, and the three produced the book as a team. The final product was translated into English by Don Knotting.
Each chapter begins with a black-and-white photograph of Morimoto at “work”. Each is sprinkled with tweets from Morimoto’s “customers” and Morimoto’s responses. (The majority of Morimoto’s “jobs” don’t literally qualify as “nothing”, but they are mostly passive acts with little or no economic value that nevertheless have value for his “customers”. That’s what’s important here.) Readers get to experience Morimoto’s “doing nothing” second-hand. Morimoto helps a stranger speak to a downstairs neighbor about rescuing dropped laundry. He splits a Starbucks frappuccino with someone who doesn’t think he or she will be able to finish one alone. He sits and watches someone write a novel. He makes an appointment with someone so he or she can get out of a wedding without lying—and then forgets to cancel the day of as promised. A reader could easily flip through Morimoto’s “memoir” for just these excerpts for an entertaining hour.
The themes taken up in Rental Person are appearing more frequently in works translated from Japanese.
“Rental Person” as a persona is almost a piece of performance art. Morimoto is aware of himself as a “social media personality” and sometimes speaks of “Rental Person” as a character who is playing. (Although he “consciously [tries] to avoid acquiring a character”, the studied absence of a personality is itself a kind of character.) He takes certain “jobs” because he knows they will be “something to tweet about”. He feels like he has to tweet when his tastes change because “it makes Rental Person seem human”.
And if “Rental Person” is performance art, the statement it is making is perhaps a quietly anti-capitalist one. Capitalism is a system that tends to define people’s value by the economic value they create. In the minds of some critics, it also shapes interpersonal relationships into something transactional and reciprocal. Even the act of maintaining friendships often requires spending money for something as simple as sharing a meal together—“It would be misleading to say we pay for friendship,” Morimoto points out, “But friends certainly cost money.” “Rental Person” undermines all of that. Not that Morimoto or Rental Person makes a serious and explicit political claim. That would be doing something, after all.
The idea that people have value no matter what value they produce is an idea Morimoto takes both seriously and personally. As the reader discovers later in the book, Morimoto’s older brother has never been employed because he “messed up his university entrance exams”. When his sister couldn’t find a job, she killed herself. Society deemed both without value because they “did nothing”; Morimoto thinks they’re valuable “simply because [they] are there”. He continues
Gaps like that in their perceived value can be a huge source of stress for anybody who, by society’s standards, doesn’t seem able to do anything. People can die because of the stress of adapting to society. Or they can lose every ounce of their energy. I’ve seen it happen.
The themes taken up in Rental Person are appearing more frequently in works translated from Japanese. Manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge found himself in a similar situation during Japan’s Bubble Era of the 1980s, chronicled in his partially autobiographical manga The Man without Talent, translated by Ryan Holmberg in 2020. (Tsuge’s wife, Fugiwara Maki, wrote about the same period in his life in her My Picture Diary, translated last year also by Holmberg.) Kohei Sato’s Slow Down, recently translated by Brian Bergstrom, is a compelling, non-fiction critique of the kind of mass consumerism Morimoto’s memoir implicitly critiques.
Ultimately, Morimoto’s entire “Rental Person” project exists simply because he doesn’t want his identity “to be defined by a set of abilities”. And Rental Person is compelling because the reader follows along with a man living an unconventional life by an unusual set of principles that call many of the assumptions of modern society into question. Morimoto retains his vision to the end of the memoir, which closes with notes from his editor and co-author’s attempts to get his help on an afterword. After a little bit of back and forth, Morimoto responds
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