The wife asked Nishida for details about how she and the daughter should act. Nishida demonstrated the characteristic toss of the head with which his late wife had rearranged her hair, and his daughter’s playful way of poking him in the ribs. Then the women started acting. The rental wife called him Kazu, just as his real wife had, and tossed her head to shake back her hair. The rental daughter playfully poked him in the ribs. An observer would have taken them for a real family.
Nishida booked a second meeting. This time, the wife and daughter came to his house. The wife cooked okonomiyaki, a kind of pancake that Nishida’s late wife had made, while Nishida chatted with the daughter. Then they ate dinner together and watched television.
More family dinners followed, usually at Nishida’s house, though one time they went out for monjayaki, another variety of pancake beloved by the late Mrs. Nishida. It hadn’t been a fancy meal, and Nishida wondered whether he should have taken the women, who were, after all, his guests, to a nicer place. Then again, in real life, the Nishidas hadn’t gone to any of those nicer places.
Before another meeting, it occurred to Nishida to send Family Romance a copy of his house key. When he came home from work that night, the lights were on, the house was warm, and a wife and daughter were there to say, “Welcome home.”
“That was very nice,” Nishida recalled, smiling slightly. He said he didn’t miss the women when they left—not with any sense of urgency or longing. But he did think, “It would be nice to spend some time like that with them again.”
Nishida said that, although he still calls them by the names of his wife and daughter, and the meetings still take the form of family dinners, the women have, to some extent, stopped acting and “turned into their own selves.” The rental wife sometimes “breaks out of the shell of the rental family” enough to complain about her real husband, and Nishida gives her advice. With this loosening of the roles, he realized that he, too, had been acting, playing the part of “a good husband and father,” trying not to seem too miserable, telling his daughter how to hold her rice bowl. Now he felt lighter, able for the first time to talk about his real daughter, about how shocked he had been when she announced her decision to move in with a boyfriend he had never met, and how they had argued and broken off contact.
On the subject of the real daughter, the rental daughter had a lot to say: as someone in her early twenties, she could tell that Nishida hadn’t spoken correctly, or expressed himself in the right way. He’d made it hard for his daughter to apologize and it was up to him to create an opening. “Your daughter is waiting for you to call her,” she told him. To me, this sentence had the eerie ring of something uttered at a séance. Nishida himself seemed uncertain about how and for whom the rental daughter had spoken. “She was acting as a rental daughter, but at the same time she was telling me how she felt as a real daughter,” he said. “And yet, if it was a real father-daughter relationship, maybe she wouldn’t have spoken this honestly.”
Eventually, Nishida called his daughter—something he says he wouldn’t have done if the rental substitute hadn’t helped him see her point of view. It took a few tries to get through, but they were eventually able to talk. One day, he came home from work to find fresh flowers for his wife on the family altar, and he understood that his daughter had been at the house while he was gone.
“I’ve been telling her to come home,” he said carefully, folding and refolding a hand towel that the waitress had brought him. “I’m hoping to meet her again soon.”
Yūichi Ishii, the founder of Family Romance, told me that he and his “cast” actively strategize in order to engineer outcomes like Nishida’s, in which the rental family makes itself redundant in the client’s life. His goal, he said, is “to bring about a society where no one needs our service.” A handsome man in his mid-thirties, he came to one of our meetings straight from a TV interview, wearing a pin-striped suit and matching cufflinks and tie pin that featured a blue cameo with a horse. His business card has a cartoon of his face on it, and a slogan that translates as “More pleasure than the pleasure reality can provide.”
Born in Tokyo, Ishii grew up on the Chiba coast, where his father was a fruit dealer and his mother taught swimming. When he was in elementary school, his friends would gather around a pay phone to listen to him make prank calls, disguising his voice as a grownup’s; only he could make such calls without laughing. At twenty, he was scouted by a talent agency, and got a few jobs as a model and a movie extra. He also had regular work as a caregiver for the elderly. He showed me pictures on his phone of his younger self at different senior-home festivities, dressed variously as Marilyn Manson or in drag, surrounded by delighted residents. He loved the feeling of helping people, and was proud of being the most requested caregiver, even when residents were transferred to different facilities. In effect, he was already a rental grandson.