rental person who does nothing

Wow, Rental Person Who Does Nothing, by Shoji Morimoto, was a strange and fascinating book! My friend Ana recommended it, and she said I should buy the paper version, not the audio version, because of the way the text is organized and there are pictures. She was right.

This is a very unusual (and short) memoir of a Japanese man who decided that he just wanted to do nothing. His previous studied sciences, and jobs as scientist and writer bored him, he didn’t enjoy working with other people, he felt like no one cared if he went to work or not, and he couldn’t handle work-related stress well. In the end, he decided to create a new job for himself: he became a « rental person who does nothing. »

He advertised his services on Twitter and had a surprisingly quick and extensive response. People of all ages, genders, and backgrounds would contact him and ask him the simplest or the oddest or the funniest requests. If it involved him doing « nothing, » he would accept. He didn’t want to have to make conversation, to like or dislike something, to listen actively, or to have the « clients » have any expectations. He went to concerts, pet someone’s dog, waved goodbye at the train station, walked around an old neighbourhood, ate at restaurants, watched while people were writing manuscripts, sent encouraging messages, visited people at hospitals, ate ice cream, attended church and business meetings, travelled on the train for hours, met sleepy students…  And most of the time, he didn’t get a yen for it!

At first, I thought he would be the kind of person you hire to pretend to be your boyfriend at a family reunion because your parents always ask you when you’re getting married, but that’s not it. Pretending to be a boyfriend would require work, learning about the person and her family, interacting with people, pretending to be someone, and lying. This « rental person » does not want to do any of this! But of course, as he says, « it’s difficult to draw a clear line between doing nothing and doing something. »

The most interesting part, for me, was his discussion of friendship, and how finding friends and being a friend require time and money and effort and responsibilities. As he explains, every relationship « entails particular things you have to do, certain expectations that you have to meet. » He talks about the Japanese art of « out-gifting, » which is that if someone gives you a gift, you have to give them a more valuable gift in return. And he also talks about the fact that often, it’s easier to tell your secrets to people you don’t know than to people you know.

I really liked this book and found it funny, sad, fascinating, strange, and beautiful, and sometimes also frustrating because I wanted to know more! It’s the story of one human being trying to have value without doing anything, how he discovered that the most important thing in people’s lives is one another, and how he managed to create a job that is more valuable than that of CEOs and scientists and writers and all other « typical jobs » out there.