Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto, translated by Don Knotting (Hanover Square Press)

What does a person do when all their only ambition is to do nothing? For Shoji Morimoto, the solution is to do nothing as an occupation. Through Twitter, he makes it known that he is available for any situation where another person is needed, just so long as he is required to do nothing. He began this pursuit in 2018 and has done nothing for other people over 4000 times since then. For this, he charges only his travel expenses, asking that any food or drink required during the appointment be covered by the client. Later he puts the client’s request and a summary of his response to it on Twitter, which is his only form of advertising. At the time this book was written, he received three requests a day for his service. Within ten months of launching this enterprise his Twitter followers went from 300 to 100,000. Apparently he has found a Japanese need and is quite busily filling it.

Who asks for a person who will do nothing? Artists of all kinds--writers, manga illustrators, musicians--ask Morimoto to sit with them, silently, while they create. A marathon runner wanted him to stand at the finish line, waiting for the entrant to complete the race. Others ask that he attend court proceedings as an onlooker, meet them at an airport, wave them off as they leave on a train. One endearing request is that he join another man to have an ice cream soda, something the client is too embarrassed to do on his own. Another job results in a spectacular hangover when Morimoto is asked to sit in a park while the client drinks a can of chu-hai (a shochu highball). “Summer, nighttime, a park, alcohol…I got pretty drunk,” he confesses in a tweet.

Others have more complex requests. One woman wants to talk about her girlfriend, whom she hasn’t revealed to her family or friends. A patient in a hospital asks for a visit in the suicide risk intensive care unit she’s been placed in. A man divulges at the end of his time period that he used to be a member of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. Another wants Morimoto to spend a day with him in his home because he’s never shared it with another person. He confesses when the day is over that he had been released from prison where he served a sentence for murder.

This is an occupation that requires a lack of personality, evaluation, advice, or judgment. Morimoto is careful to keep his responses neutral, sticking with “Uh-huh” and “I see.” His role, as he sees it, is to fall between “friend” and “stranger” during his times with a client. He serves as a sort of quasi-friend to the person who’s engaged his services. Between the two of them there’s no emotional history and no demands of reciprocity--which is why one woman asks him to have dinner with her at a very expensive restaurant. If she asked a friend, that person would feel obligated to do the same for her.

Because Morimoto approaches his work as a blank slate that the client fills as they wish, the obvious question is will he eventually be replaced by a robot? Not in Japan, he says, where people suffer from “AI fatigue” and yearn for human contact, even for something as simple as receiving a reminder message. 

Since he charges nothing, how does he survive? From savings garnered from his brief foray into financial trading is what he claims, although a Reuters article quotes him as saying that when he first began as Rental Person, he charged 10,000 yen (about $71) per rental.

Although he initially depended heavily upon Twitter for exposure, Morimoto has been featured in manga, has inspired a TV series, and, according to the author information that appears on the final page, he’s written other books. Not too shabby for a man who claims he does nothing.~Janet Brown