The Brooklyn Rail

The top related search terms for “the art of doing nothing” are “the power of doing nothing,” “the benefits of doing nothing,” “how to enjoy doing nothing,” and the Italian proxy phrase “il dolce far niente” or the sweetness of doing nothing—an idiom-turned-buzzphrase popularized after Julia Roberts’s character learned it in Eat, Pray, Love. That movie was released in 2010 and in the succeeding decades worsening labor conditions, a global pandemic and a lockdown, shifted public opinion ever further in favor of escaping the productivity prison of capitalism. Years ago, one particularly prescient man named Shoji Morimoto discovered that not only was it sweet to far niente, but also, that he could turn doing nothing into a career. His new memoir, Rental Person Who Does Nothing, looks back at how the project began, and offers reflections on his experiences of being rented out.

Morimoto, aka Rental Person, is a thirty-something Japanese man based in Tokyo. In 2018 he wrote a tweet to his small community of three-hundred followers announcing the start of a service called Do-nothing Rental “available for any situation in which all you want is a person to be there.” Within ten months his follower count had ballooned to 100,000 and he was being flooded with requests. The tweet was like a bat signal for the lonely and socially anxious. He remembers being confused at the level of interest and celebrity his venture garnered and shares that this book is an attempt to answer the question, “Why should a person like that be in demand?”

Throughout the book Morimoto attempts to explain the paradoxical position of being a service provider who does nothing. He alludes to an old Aesop fable in which a character converses with a patch of reeds. “I’m just there, like those reeds,” he explains. The client requests vary in type and level of commitment. Though, he observes, “I get a surprising number of requests to listen to people.” In one wholesome client story, Morimoto offers an ear to a queer woman who is not yet out of the closet and just wants to talk to someone about her wonderful girlfriend. An aspiring writer trying to meet a deadline for a writing competition asked him to spend the day sitting in front of them in their home while they worked, to force productivity, which proved successful. Another requested only that Morimoto think of them at some point during the day. Of the latter request, Morimoto notes that after reaching out to the client to confirm he had done so, they messaged that they had felt the effect before he had confirmed that the transaction was complete. Whether he thought of them or not, the client was satisfied by the act of writing to him, of naming their need.

In the intervening years since his first post, Morimoto has responded to numerous requests and built a cultish following which he seems simultaneously grateful for and burdened by. Though many regard him as a kind hero for responding to these bat signals, Morimoto rejects the excessively flattering portrayals of him that he believes exist in people’s minds as a result of not only doing these jobs but sharing them with his Twitter audience. In his worldview he is just a warm body, a stranger to clients. With each client story though, the reader is asked to consider whether someone you’ve shared something intimate with—a meal, a cry, a secret—can remain a stranger. Couple this dilemma with the fact that some clients are not solely seeking out any person but Rental Person specifically. One man who was running the Yokohama Marathon asked him to wait for him at the finishing line because “You’re someone I really want to meet and I feel that if you were standing at the finishing line I’d be able to push myself that bit more.” But, the benefit of a book-length documentation of this project is not that it grants us a wide evidentiary pool to unravel Rental Person’s premise. It’s that it gives us a peek behind the phenomena of him. This deliberately slight book is tight with tension because it is an attempt to get to know a man who is determined not to be knowable.

Fortunately, the memoir format by design interrogates and creates character. Morimoto has a postgraduate degree in physics from Osaka University and used to work in publishing. Reflecting on his past as an office worker he shares that he suffered under a verbally abusive boss who made him feel worthless by repeatedly saying that it would make no difference whether he was there or not. While he doesn’t open up about his present family life, he shares that he has a wife and child (a disclosure he acknowledges puts clients at ease) and that she is supportive of his do-nothing business for now.

The most illuminating personal detail he shares concerns his older siblings, a brother and his late sister who died by suicide. Morimoto explains that his brother failed a university entrance exam and developed depression and is now well into mid-life never having had a job. His sister meanwhile experienced a series of failures on the job hunt which prevented her life from panning out as she wanted it to. His reflections on the detriments of a productivity-obsessed society and his siblings’ unhappiness are the most emotional beats in the book. “I felt the value of my precious siblings being warped and eroded because of the expectations of society,” he explains. “For me, though, she had value simply because she was there.” Their stories seem to form the core of a philosophy that both guides and is the hypothesis of his work: human life has inherent value regardless of productivity so even people who “do nothing” are valuable.

Ironically, Morimoto expresses a functional answer to the book’s proposed question within its first twenty pages. “Things can be different simply because someone is there,” he writes. “They don’t have to be there, but if they are, something changes.” There are speciality groups founded on this truth, like an LGBTQ group that offers stand-in services for queer people with unsupportive families who need support at important life events—like being cheered on at graduation or being walked down the aisle. More universally, anyone who has ever run an errand alone and then again with a friend tagging along recognizes the truth in that statement. Life feels lighter when we keep each other company. Though it is debatable whether his service concretely involves “doing nothing,” Morimoto’s and the book’s value are less debatable. Rental Person is affirmative of the human experience. The client case stories in this book and Morimoto’s quasi-philosophical approach to them are shining attestations of the ineffable value of human fellowship. On the book’s cover, two silhouettes sit beside each other on a bench. Neither have faces. Rental Person is illuminated in color and the other body is monotone, drawn like an audience insert. Their elbows are close enough to create friction.