Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir by Shoji Morimoto

Hardback: '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.' - Shoji Morimoto

Foreword: Twitter @morimotoshoji  I'm starting a service called Do-nothing Rental. It's available for any situation in which all you want is a person to be there. Maybe there's a restaurant you want to go to, but you feel awkward going on your own. Maybe a game you want to play, but you're one person short. Or perhaps you'd like someone to keep a space in the park for your cherry blossom viewing party... I only charge transport (from Kokubunji Station) and cost of food/drink (if applicable). I can't do anything except give very simple responses.

With this tweet, I became 'Rental Person', a Rental Person Who Does Nothing. At the time, I had 300 followers. Ten months later, I had 100,000. The number of requests has grown too, and now I get a steady flow of about three a day.

I find it utterly amazing. Why on earth has it happened? When I started the service, I thought it might be interesting, but I never imagined it would result in a book, a manga or TV programmes. And when I try to hide my surprise, people started talking about my 'aura', as though I'm some kind of star.

Readers must find it bizarre. Nobody could have predicted this reaction. After all, I do nothing. I am the type that people get cross with - at home, at work, at a barbecue. Why should a person like that be in demand?

This book, Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir (2023) - is an attempt to answer that question. 

If it was written simply by me, I think it would be too subjective. I'm very confused about what's happened and on my own, I'd find it tough to come up with a convincing book. So we tried an experiment. A writer (S) and an editor (T) asked me questions and I gave them very simple responses, and through that process we tried to find an answer. S is not a particular fan of Rental Person. He has written objectively, and in a way that people who don't know anything about my activities can get a clear picture.

So with that as my excuse, I have, as usual, done nothing. I have simply watched, with interest and surprise, as this book has developed.

Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir (2023) was originally published in Japan as Rental Nanmo Shinai Hito in 2019 and translated into the English by Don Knotting in 2023.

About the author: Shoji Morimoto was born in 1983. He began working as a rental person who does nothing in 2018 and has since been hired more than 4,000 times. He has been profiled by many media outlets worldwide and has written several books including Rental Person Who Does Nothing, which inspired a Japanese TV series. Morimoto lives in Japan with his wife and son.

Sacred And Great: A Brief Introduction To The Traditional Latin Mass by Joseph Shaw

Booklet: For Catholics used to the newer form of the Mass or Novus Ordo, experiencing the older form raises a lot of questions. 

Why has the priest got his back to me? 

Why is everything in Latin? 

Why is there so much chant, and so much silence? 

How am I supposed to participate in this liturgy? 

How might this seemingly strange, archaic ritual be spiritually fruitful for me? 

This booklet has been written to answer these and similar questions, as briefly, clearly, and serenely as possible:

1) How Do I Participate in the Traditional Mass?

2) What Does It Mean? Ceremonies and Prayers

3) Where Did It Come From? The Organic Development of the Liturgy

4) What Is It For? The Place of the Traditional Mass in the Church

Sacred And Great: A Brief Introduction To The Traditional Latin Mass (2023) ends with a helpful guide to readings and resources.

Sacred And Great: A Brief Introduction To The Traditional Latin Mass is available on Amazon (UK and USA) or directly from the publisher https://osjustipress.com/products/sacred-and-great.

About the author: Dr Joseph Shaw has a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford University, where he also gained a first degree in Politics and Philosophy and a graduate Diploma in Theology. He has published on Ethics and Philosophy of Religion and has edited The Case for Liturgical Restoration: Una Voce Position Papers on the Extraordinary Form (Angelico Press). He is the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and President of Una Voce International. 

Shaw was also an early critic of Pope Francis’s motu proprio Traditionis custodes, which abrogated permissions for celebration of the Tridentine Mass. He teaches Philosophy at Oxford University and lives nearby with his wife and nine children.

I Wanted To Be A Reader

The Widening Of Tolo Highway: A Hong Kong Story Of Paranoia And Protest by Lucy Hamilton

Paperback: ANNA RETURNS TO FACE A PAST SHE NEVER TRULY LEFT BEHIND.

It wasn’t the middle but the very edge of nowhere.

It was always just a little too still.

It is 2017. Typhoon Hato has ripped through the streets of Hong Kong. National Day is looming. The momentum of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution has faded. British woman, Anna, has returned to her old village in the New Territories to search for Kallum, a disillusioned local activist, from whom she has heard nothing since her departure two years ago.

Suspecting he was targeted for his involvement in the protests, Anna widens her search, scouring the streets of Kowloon and the Island for signs he is alive. Alone in her tiny, rented room in the notorious Chungking Mansions, gruesome flashbacks disturb her sleep. Paranoia swells. Memory, delusion, and reality begin to blur.

Against a backdrop of construction works, storm damage and scaffolding, Anna is confronted by a daunting panorama. She may know more about the past than she has let herself believe.

The Widening of Tolo Highway: A Hong Kong Story of Paranoia and Protest (2022) is Lucy Hamilton's unputdownable debut semi-fictional novel. 

About the author: Lucy Hamilton grew up in Dronfield, a quiet town in the north of England. She lived briefly in Australia, before moving to Hong Kong, where she began work on her first novel, The Widening of Tolo Highway. The novel is a semi-fictional account of expatriate life in the New Territories, set against backdrop of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution. While writing Tolo Highway, she also trained as a Behaviour Analyst, dividing her time between the USA, Asia and the UK. In 2019, she completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Sheffield, where she had previously studied English Literature as an undergraduate. She now teaches in Stylistics at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China.

Rating: 5/5

Immigrants And Immigration-Descended Population

Thinking About Thinking

Saint Raphael Kalinowski: An Introduction To His Life And Spirituality by Szczepan T Praśkiewicz OCD

Booklet: Little known outside his native Poland, Joseph Kalinowski (Raphael of St. Joseph, OCD) was born in 1835 and became, by turns, an engineer, a military officer, a leader in the 1863 insurrection against Russian domination, an exile in Siberia, a tutor, and eventually a Discalced Carmelite priest. He died in 1907 at the Carmelite monastery he had founded in Wadowice, the city where Karol Wojtyla - the future Pope John Paul II who would later beatify and canonize him - was born only 13 years later. 

Today Raphael Kalinowski is remembered especially as a man of boundless charity in the Siberian prison camps, a restorer of Carmel in Poland, a skilled confessor and spiritual director, and a tireless promoter of Marian devotion and of unity between the Eastern and Western Churches. 

In 1991, he became the first Discalced Carmelite friar canonized since St John of the Cross. 

This booklet offers a concise introduction to one of the pope's favourite saints, and includes a brief biography of Saint Raphael Kalinowski, a synthesis of his spiritual message, 12 photos, and for the first time in English, selections from his writings.

Saint Raphael Kalinowski: An Introduction To His Life And Spirituality (1998, 2016) is translated from the Italian by Thomas Coonan and Michael Griffin OCD; and from the Polish-to-Italian by Lawrence Sullivan OCD.

About the author: Szczepan T Praśkiewicz OCD was born in Chmielnik, Poland, in 1958. He attended the Carmelite Minor Seminary in Wadowice, founded by Raphael Kalinowski, and made his religious profession as a Discalced Carmelite in 1978. Ordained in 1983, he earned a diploma in Mariology and in 1988, completed his doctorate in theological anthropology at the Teresianum in Rome. From 1983 to 1990, he served as Prefect of the Order's International College in Rome. He assisted the OCD Postulator General in the final phase of the canonization process for Raphael Kalinowski and has published numerous studies on the Saint, including a Kalinowski bibliography and his own Italian translation of Raphael Kalinowski's Memoirs. He now serves as secretary of the missions for the Order at the Discalced Carmelite Generalate in Rome, Italy. 

Half-Life: The Decay of Reality by Abbé Jean-Pierre Boubée, SSPX

Booklet: At long last, a balanced and easy to read booklet about the cyber world! 

Many a parent is at a loss before the tsunami of screen devices which confronts them and their loved ones. These tools are designed to facilitate life, to offer information ready at our fingertips, to communicate with anyone all the time and everywhere.

The technological advancements of this age are undeniable. But have you ever stopped to consider how technology may be affecting different aspects of your life?

Half-Life: The Decay of Reality (2018) takes and unabashed look at the all too real consequences of day-to-day exposure to the digital world. It asks what its effects are on children, families, dating, marriage and even intelligence and thought processes, but especially peace of soul. Understanding the consequences of this digital age is key to living a better life and ultimately having a stronger faith. 

Half-Life: The Decay of Reality is originally published as Communications, écrans, internet, jeux vidéo... si on faisait le point! (2015, 4th edition, revised). 

Half-Life: The Decay of Reality is translated from the French by Ann Marie Temple. 

GREATER AND GREATER ISOLATION:

"By a kind of paradox, this constant presence of other people makes for a fragile construction of one's own personality...The riches to be found in genuine friendships become rare in this constant solicitation from all sides." - Fr Patrick Troadec, SSPX

The Bible

A Rebel From The Start: Setting The Record Straight by Avi Yemini

Paperback: You’ve heard what they have to say about one of Australia’s most influential commentators. Now it’s time for him to tell you the whole story.

Avi Yemini has been labelled many things by mainstream media detractors and their political allies over the years, usually targeting his character by bad faith actors pretending to know him.

The Melbourne-based Rebel News reporter has been unable to (legally) respond to some of their worst smears.

Until today.

Usually, Avi tells others’ stories. Now he tells his. In this tell-all book - A Rebel From The Start: Setting The Record Straight (2023), Avi ends his uncharacteristic silence to set the record straight.

Trigger warning: his story is always compelling but not always pretty. Avi is the tenth of seventeen children raised in an ultra-orthodox Jewish home who found himself on the street, on drugs and on the wrong side of the law as a young teenager. He turned to the Israeli Army for salvation, then moved back to restart his life in Australia, only to find himself in a toxic relationship that has been weaponised by those who hate how he landed on his feet.

But every challenge Avi faced only helped form the popular personality, loving father and husband and he’s only getting started.

For more copies of this book, please visit www.RebelNews.com.

About the author: Avi Yemini is an Australian right-wing political activist, commentator and internet personality. He has worked for Rebel News since 2020, and currently works as its Australian Bureau Chief. Yemini served with the Golani Brigade in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) from 2005 until 2008. Most of his active duty was spent in the Gaza Strip. After returning to Australia, Yemini opened his first IDF gym in Caulfield, Victoria followed by a second in Melbourne's CBD in 2016. In 2018, the gyms were sold to a private buyer. Today, Avi Yemini is a valued citizen journalist for the online-Canadian publication, Rebel News.

The Sister by Sung-Yoon Lee

Hardback: 'In explaining the rise to power of Kim Yo Jong, Lee displays his deep knowledge and understanding of North Korea's extreme, ruthless and self-obsessed dynastic autocracy, the creators and rulers of a de-facto nuclear weapon state. Not a reassuring story.' - Sir John Scarlett, former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)

Written by Dr Sung-Yoon Lee, a scholar and specialist on North Korea who has advised the US government, The Sister (2023) is a jaw-dropping account of the spectacular rise of Kim Yo Jong, de-facto deputy to her brother, Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, and the most powerful woman in North Korea. She is the sister of Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and, as her murderous regime's chief propagandist, internal administrator and foreign policymaker, she is the most powerful woman in North Korea's history. Cruel but charming, she threatens and insults foreign leaders with sardonic wit. A princess by birth with great expectations for her macabre kingdom, she was brought up to believe it is her mission to reunite North Korea with the South, or die trying. She is pretty, she seems demure, she is cold, and she is incredibly dangerous.

In 2022, in a particularly fiery speech, Kim Yo Jong threatened to nuke South Korea, reminding the world of the dangers posed by her state. But how did the youngest daughter of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, his ‘sweet princess’, become the ruthless chief propagandist, internal administrator and foreign policymaker for her brother’s totalitarian regime?

The Sister (2023) uncovers the truth about Kim Yo Jong, her close bond with Kim Jong Un and the lessons in manipulation they learned from their father. He also examines the iron grip the Kim dynasty has on their country, the grotesque deaths of family members deemed disloyal, and the signs that Kim Yo Jong has been positioned as her brother’s successor should he die while his own children are young.

Readable and insightful, this book is an invaluable portrait of a woman who might yet hold the survival of her despotic dynasty in her hands.

About the author: Sung-Yoon Lee is a scholar of Korean and East Asian studies and a specialist on North Korea. He is the Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor in Korean Studies and Assistant Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Faculty Associate at the Program on US-Japan Relations, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Dr Lee has advised senior-most officials in the US government and is an outspoken proponent of several policies aimed at changing the North Korean regime towards a path of denuclearization and improvement of human rights, while keeping the peace and stability in Northeast Asia. In 2013, the Guardian called Lee "[a]mong the most insightful and prescient chroniclers." The Sister is his first book.

Priest, Where Is Thy Mass? Mass, Where Is Thy Priest?: Sixteen Independent Priests Tell Why They Celebrate the Latin Mass - The Seminary Interviews

Paperback: These interviews were conducted as an apostolate to Roman Catholic priests by St Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota, of the Society of Saint Pius X. The intention of this apostolate was to record common areas of concern between the priests interviewed and other priests who are struggling with living their Catholic priesthood in today's Church and world. it is difficult for many priests to do so, torn as they are between belief and action.

The interviews, granted between May 2002 and September 2003, reveal that the crises of conscience faced by these seventeen priests became extreme enough that they took extreme action to leave the celebration of the New Mass and to celebrate exclusively the Traditional Mass.

The priests whose interviews are published here are normal, sound and clear-thinking. None are member-priests of the Society of Saint Pius X. Strictly doctrinal theses are good and necessary, especially in this time of crisis, but these interviews put a human face to it.

Priest, Where Is Thy Mass? Mass, Where Is Thy Priest - Expanded Edition (2004) tells the stories of seventeen priests who sided with the "Faith that the Catholic conscience is bound to forever". The Nine Cardinal Commission of 1986 states that priests are not obliged to celebrate the New Mass and bishops cannot forbid or place restrictions on the celebration of the traditional rite of Mass whether in public or private. These seventeen priests refused to collaborate with the ecumenical Liturgical Revolution that has been a disaster for the Church. Because of traditional priests, Catholics worldwide are instructed in the traditional Faith, nourished by the traditional Sacraments, brought into an atmosphere of supreme reverence, and take part in a sacred action that is - without ambiguity or apology - a true representation of Our Lord's Passion and Death on Calvary. 

Highly Desirable: Tales Of London's Super-Prime Property From The Secret Agent

Hardback: 'Max' is London's most exclusive property agent and this is his diary.

Over the course of a year, Max charts the fabulous highs and bank-breaking lows of his business, where houses in the super-prime bracket can start at £30 million and clients are rarely easy to please.

From sipping green juices with an Oscar winner to finding a dream home for the world's trickiest billionaire, and House & Garden-featured locales to Palladian dwellings worth £4,000 a square foot, Max and his team negotiate the UK's biggest property deals during the day and their own romantic dramas at night.

Highly Desirable (2023) is the ultimate insider's account of the personalities and machinations that rule a world we almost never get a true glimpse of. Holding nothing back, Max labours mightily to balance his professional life with his love life, and to reconcile his company's payroll with the demands of an over-the-top clientele.

Highly Desirable is a showcase of the good, the bad and the bizarre of the real-estate market for the super-rich. The author has had to obfuscate some details to protect the identities of those portrayed in the book although he has tried to capture the essence of their characters and the spirit of the business. 

About the author: The Secret Agent has run his own business dealing in the super-prime London market for twenty years. For five years, he wrote the hugely popular weekly 'Secret Agent' column in the Financial Times, and now does so in Bloomberg. He has an MA and MFA in Creative Writing and lives in London.

The Sweet Remnants Of Summer (An Isabel Dalhousie Novel Series) by Alexander McCall Smith

Paperback: The latest Isabel Dalhousie novel finds our favourite moral philosopher caught up in a delicate dispute between members of a prominent family as her husband, Jamie, is dragged into his own internecine rivalry.

When Isabel is invited to serve on the advisory committee of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, her husband, Jamie, expresses concern about the demands on her time. Never one to duck an obligation, however, Isabel says she’d be happy to join. There she meets a woman named Laura, whose husband - a prominent wine merchant from an illustrious family - and son are at odds. Laura asks whether Isabel might arbitrate between them. Isabel is reluctant to intervene in a familial drama but, always one for practical and courteous solutions to theoretical problems, she feels obligated to help. Will the demands on her moral attention never cease?

Meanwhile, having criticized Isabel for getting involved in the affairs of others, Jamie does precisely that himself. He is helping to select a new cellist for his ensemble but suspects that the conductor’s attention may be focused on something other than his favoured candidate’s cello skills. Jamie feels it is important that the most qualified applicant gets the job - but how to determine whether the conductor has the right qualifications in mind?

With so many complicated and fraught issues demanding their attention, Isabel and Jamie will have to tap deep into their reserves of tact and goodwill as they navigate the tricky and turbulent waters of these emotional matters.

The Sweet Remnants of Summer (2022) is the fourteenth instalment in the excellent Isabel Dalhousie novel series set in Edinburgh, Scotland.

About the author: Alexander McCall Smith, often referred to as ‘Sandy’, is one of the world’s most prolific and best-loved authors. His various series of books have been translated into forty-six languages and become bestsellers throughout the world. These include the highly successful The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the popular 44 Scotland Street novels, the Isabel Dalhousie novels, the von Igelfeld series and the new Detective Varg novels. He also writes stand-alone novels, children's fiction and libretti for short operas. 

Alexander has received numerous awards for his writing and holds thirteen honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and North America.  He is Professor Emeritus of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. In 2007, he received a CBE for services to literature and in 2011 was honoured by the President of Botswana for services through literature to the country.  In 2015, he received the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and in 2017, The National Arts Club (of America) Medal of Honour for Achievement in Literature. In 2020, he received the honorary fellowship of the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival. And in 2022, he received the Lifetime Achievement in the Saltire Literary Awards. 

Rating: 4/5