"Then... his older sister struggled to find the right career path. When she didn’t get a job she wanted, she took her own life. Witnessing his siblings try and fail to find their place in the world of work must, I say, have informed his decision to turn his back on conventional employment. He considers this. 'I can’t quite tell myself how what happened to my siblings influenced me,' he says. 'But what happened, I think, is that they couldn’t really go into society. That’s what we say in Japan: ‘go into society’. It means that you are becoming a proper grown-up. In modern society, in Japanese society, you have to be a proper adult to be acceptable, but my brother and sister couldn’t work, so they weren’t accepted. They were rejected by society. And that just made me determined that I don’t want to be in a world where my siblings weren’t accepted... I went to university. I made a great effort... I got a job and I wanted to get on with people, and I wanted to be like other people. I tried harder and harder, but I just couldn’t do it. However hard I tried, I wouldn’t be able to be like the others... [I feel] an anger... towards... the atmosphere of society, that you’re not worth anything if you don’t do anything, and that you have to be productive. And I just want to say, "No. Everybody is worth their existence."'"
I wrote about this man last year —
here — but I'm calling attention to him again because he has
a forthcoming memoir (paid link) and because the Times is interviewing him.
“As Rental Person, I have only the flimsiest connection with my clients,” he says in his memoir. “I am practically transparent. They have a story they have to tell and it’s my role to be there while they tell it. In one of Aesop’s fables, a character longs to tell a secret and so tells it to the reeds. I’m just there, like those reeds.”...
At best, Morimoto is an impassive confessor. He does not advise or commiserate or look people in the eye and tell them he understands. Usually, he says, the people telling him things don’t even want this of him. They just need him there, doing nothing, while they speak. Those who have never used him often think he is motivated by benevolence. He wants to be clear that he is not.
There's an excerpt from his book. An excerpt of the excerpt:
We’d been chatting for quite some time when, finally, in a very off-hand way, he started talking about his hidden past. “I was in a young offenders’ institution when I was a teenager,” he said.
“Oh yes?” I said, nodding as I normally do.
“Well, yes,” he said quietly. “Actually, I… er… killed someone.”... Somehow it really took me aback to think that a person who cooked so well, who gave an overall impression of competence, could have such a dark past.
The incongruity had a real impact on me. In a way, I was very moved.
Since then, I think I’ve looked at people in a different way, realizing that even the most ordinary, upright-looking people are not what they seem....
By the way, there was a blogger who heard there was an Aesop fable with a character who tells a secret to the reeds. The blogger searched the complete text of Aesop's fables for "reeds" and "secret" but found nothing. And the moral is:
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