REVIEW: Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir (memoir) by Shoji Morimoto, translated by Don Knotting

Rental Person Who Does Nothing is a memoir. I bought my copy new.

Review:

I first found out about Rental Person Who Does Nothing via an article that described him and his work. In Japan, there are apparently rental services where you can rent a person for various purposes - acting as a stand-in father at a school function, a friend for a short period of time, a guide, etc. Morimoto was prompted to start his "Rental Person Who Does Nothing" activities due to various factors: an abusive boss and a desire to avoid stress and feelings of obligation. Basically, it sounded like burnout?

At any rate, Morimoto set up a Twitter account and began fulfilling client requests, as long as he wasn't required to do anything other than show up, exist, and, at best, provide simple responses. This book mentions a lot of his requests and what fulfilling them was like. For example, one person requested that he watch them as they worked on their novel. Another person asked him to see them off at a train station. He even fulfilled another person's request to send them a reminder at precisely 6AM. I would have figured that was too much like doing something for him to accept as a job, since it required him to be awake and ready to send the reminder, but Morimoto's definition of "doing nothing" was very much about his gut feeling (and, I think, whether agreeing to fulfill the request gave him any feelings of stress or sense of obligation).

One of the things that lessened his sense of obligation, possibly, was that he didn't charge anything for his services beyond travel and food. Which left me with a burning question: how did he make money? The answer was that he didn't, sort of. Some of his Twitter followers would give him Amazon gift cards, cash, etc. Morimoto admitted, however, that he (and his wife and baby - yes, he has a family, and I was wildly curious what this book would have been like if it had been written by his wife) were primarily living off of his savings and that this existence of his probably couldn't go on forever. 

Morimoto's "better" way of putting it was that he's a writer, and this "Rental Person" experience is like research, giving him lots of interesting and unique experiences. Although I found it odd that he'd say that when, in the book's foreword, he indicated that the book was written by a ghost writer who interviewed him and somehow turned his simple answers into this book. Was he telling the truth or was he just playing up his "Rental Person Who Does Nothing Persona"? I couldn't say, although the whole book had an emotionally detached feel to it, and very few of the requests Morimoto dealt with were written about in any sort of depth (which was especially frustrating with the more intriguing ones).

Overall, this was an odd read, very surface-level. 

Extras:

A few photographs of Morimoto doing his Rental Person work.