I first heard about Rental Person Who Does Nothing from a video on YouTube so when I saw this available I was intrigued to read it.

If nothing else, Rental Person Who Does Nothing is interesting, the concept itself but also the types of people who use the service and what they use it for. This was enough to keep me entertained throughout.

I absolutely loved this book!

Quick, easy to read. A brilliant story, and an interesting person. Absolutely brilliant, I'm going to ask my manager to get load if these in!

Thanks ever so much to @picadorbooks for sharing this title with me on @netgalley!

Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto, translated from the Japanese by Angus Turvill.

Incredibly refreshing, a lovely light read, and offering much to think about! Rental Person Who Does Nothing is a fascinating insight into modern Japanese society. The author is the eponymous person who does nothing but who, in fact, does a lot more than he thinks. At the service of his followers, he embarks on the most bizarre and mundane requests: accompanying someone to sign their divorce papers, watching them as they study or work, saving a decent space for someone under blossoming cherry trees, sending a text at a specific time upon request...

Morimoto's musings on each of the requests he receives and deadpan humour are present throughout, sometimes even verging on the purely philosophical. He doesn't charge for his 'services' and receives most of his requests via Twitter, with word-of-mouth doing the rest. The inclusion of photos in the book is also a great addition, as they are both hilariously dull and insightful (though their resolution in my Kindle wasn't the best!)

All in all, this was a great and unique read and one I would recommend widely. Personally, I completely see the appeal of having someone there, even if they're not doing actively doing anything for you. What means nothing to one person can mean the world to someone else and therein lies the brilliance of his job!

4/5

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.

This was an interesting read. It was quite slow paced, following the journey of a rental person who does nothing (except he does in a roundabout kind of way). I liked the concept and a couple of the requests (midway) I enjoyed most. Although it was fairly sedate, I didn’t feel irritated but instead rather contented.

Thanks to NetGalley for arc.

A memoir “by” a person who does nothing - they didn’t even write the book, only gave simple answers to questions. Our Rental Person is available to accompany you anywhere with the only conditions being 1) covering their travel expenses and 2) not expecting them to do anything.

This short book shows a number of things:
- Rental Person suffers from a deep malaise about work: his elder brother’s never managed to get a job and his sister couldn’t get something suitable & she died.
- The worth of a person being independent from the job that they do, and yet how inextricably linked the two are in Japan (and in many other countries too)
- The importance of other people, from company at a difficult moment to subtle peer pressure to complete task
- The tragedy in Japan of needing to keep up appearances with friends such that the only person you can unburden to is a complete stranger

A different read but, in keeping with Rental Person’s philosophy of NOT doing anything, it doesn’t come to any conclusions or proffer any suggestions on how to improve life. It just documents things as Rental Person has found them. Despite having empathy with his “customers”, Rental Person is apathetic about life which isn’t particularly appealing and offers no hope of life ever improving. As such, I’d give this a miss. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Shoji Morimoto shares his unique perspective on how we look at work, relationships and life, and how we often have trouble talking about the things most important to us with the people closest to us.

In June of 2018, thirty-five-year-old Shoji posted on Twitter offering one simple service: he will do nothing, for travel expenses. Any and all requests were fair game—seeing you off when moving, sharing a soda with you, being present alongside you when submitting divorce papers, joining you at a baseball game—so long as it conformed to his one and only requirement that he “do nothing.” Since then, Morimoto has been hired by over four thousand patrons across Japan and officially rebranded himself as Rental Person.

In this Japanese bestseller, Rental Person's clients are often desperate, their requests funny, poignant, mysterious and baffling—but never short of fascinating. For a person who follows a path that seems to run contrary to conventional success, why do so many find him so necessary?

I have mixed feelings about this very short memoir. I was intrigued - I had heard of Shoji Morimoto and his project of being a person you can rent (for free) to accompany you, as long as it requires no effort whatsoever from him.
He starts by explaining that according to his philosophy, he also did nothing to write the book apart from "giving simple answers" to questions from his editor.

The memoir itself is a mix of tweets by Shoji Morimoto, requests from his followers, and his own personal experience. I liked his commentary on what makes someone valuable to society - and his refusal to be paid for his services, as he feels this would put a monetary value on his mission. And how would you even charge? By the hour? Depending on the difficulty of the mission (is accompanying someone to file divorce paper harder than going to a cafe with someone?)

Ultimately it was interesting but a bit light. Where there could have been more about our society's desire to make everyone productive, it ended up being too anecdotal and too personal. His mission is possible because he has savings he can live on. Despite mentioning his brother and his sister both affected by their work - to the point his sister took her own life -, it felt superficial and I finished the book feeling I would have wanted more than the funny or touching anecdotes about people using his service because they feel lonely or because they feel too awkward asking friends to go with them. It was enjoyable but it felt like a missed opportunity.

Rental Person Who Does Nothing is a memoir about a Japanese man who 'does nothing' for people, spending time with people who contact him on Twitter for things they need someone else for. The book is intercut throughout with tweets that are either requests from people or Morimoto's own tweets about particular clients, as he explains what he's done and how he has found being a rental person who doesn't do anything except be there, not offering advice but just existing.

This short book is both an account of how Morimoto became Rental Person and what he's done as part of that, and also a consideration of what it means to do nothing for a living and if we should be able to have money to just exist. The stories of the clients are the really memorable elements of the book as there's a lot of emotional and quietly lovely moments for people, whether it is a prompt that makes them finally do the dishes or someone trying to make the day of filing divorce memorable for another reason. The real variation of reasons that people rent Rental Person to be there with them are fascinating and it gives an insight into human connections and the kinds of transactions between people that happen every day.