In 2018, Shoji Morimoto began to rent himself out to people as someone who did nothing except show up and spend a set amount of time with them. So if you wanted someone to accompany you for a difficult task and you couldn’t ask a friend or family, or maybe you don’t have either, then Shoji would do it. Or if you wanted someone to sit there while you worked so you wouldn’t slack off then he would show up. Even if you just wanted him to think of you while you were doing something the next day or needed a DM from him to remind you to go to the gym, Shoji would be your guy.
The popularity and novelty of what he was doing took off on social media (although it seems like he’s left Twitter now) and, five years later, now we have a book about his adventures doing “nothing” in Rental Person Who Does Nothing. But, once you get past the oddity of his job, the anecdotes he relates (true to form, he didn’t write the book, as that would be “doing something” - a ghostwriter interviewed him and put the book together with an editor based on these interviews) are fairly one note and unremarkable. It gets to be a repetitive and uninteresting book quite quickly.
I saw a video on Shoji from BBC Reel on YouTube last year that explained his strange job and the things he did (seemingly mostly accompanying people for meals). It’s a fascinating video but it doesn’t answer a lot of questions I had such as: who is this guy and what made him do this? How does he make a living? What are the nuances of his business - how does he select his assignments, what are his rules? And, perhaps optimistically, I thought this book would also go into what it says about a society and the times when someone gets a job like this.
The book answers some of these things. As he didn’t charge people for his time (initially - now he charges 10,000 yen an appointment), he lived off his savings and did some day-trading. I’m glad he’s making money now because it’s a reckless choice to give up paid employment when you have a wife and child to support - that was the other revelation about him. I thought he was a lone nutjob! But the book doesn’t mention that he charges for appointments, which is a bit misleading - I only found out that he now charges for appointments after looking him up online after finishing the book.
His rules are rather contrived though. He doesn’t technically do “nothing”. He does eat and drink when the appointment calls for it. He does respond, albeit very basically, when spoken to. He does do things like think of others or text people encouragement when asked. Surprisingly still, he has advanced qualifications in maths (I’d thought he was completely unskilled and that’s why he resorted to this line of work), and talks at length on the subject if requested.
He does mention the benefits of what he provides, in helping people get past hurdles in their lives, acting as a catalyst to doing things, or a balm to loneliness, or being a stand-in for someone wanting to talk about a difficult subject. He’s not a thoughtless person and he does have strong feelings about his job - the pressures of Japanese life, both in work success and social conformity - in large part because of what happened to his siblings. But it does still feel like an unsatisfyingly shallow look at how there could be a market for something as popular as this, particularly now.
Most of the book is Shoji recounting the various requests he’s received and his rather bland reasoning for accepting them (“It was easy” or “It seemed like a nice thing to do”, etc.) and, besides the occasional stand-out moment (one client reveals they used to be in the Aum Shinrikyo cult, another that they were a teenage murderer), the book gets to be quite dull after a short while.
I’m glad to have read it if only to find out more about his personality and other aspects of his life beyond the service he provides but, unless you’re someone who also wants to know more about him, just watching a 10 minute video on Shoji Morimoto is a better alternative to picking up Rental Person Who Does Nothing as that gives you a decent-enough overview.
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