![]() He said he didn’t miss the women when they left-not with any sense of urgency or longing. “That was very nice,” Nishida recalled, smiling slightly. 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.” Matsumoto”-he nodded toward my interpreter, Chie Matsumoto-“who might look like a career woman.” Chie, a journalist, teacher, and activist, who has spiky salt-and-pepper hair and wears plastic-framed glasses, laughed as she translated this qualification.īefore another meeting, it occurred to Nishida to send Family Romance a copy of his house key. The rental daughter was more fashionable than Nishida’s real daughter-he used the English word “sharp”-but the wife immediately impressed him as “an ordinary, generic middle-aged woman.” He added, “Unlike, for example, Ms. The cost was forty thousand yen, about three hundred and seventy dollars. On the order form, he noted his daughter’s age, and his wife’s physique: five feet tall and a little plump. Nishida contacted Family Romance and placed an order for a wife and a daughter to join him for dinner. “The grandchild was just a rental, but the woman was still really happy,” Nishida recalled. One client, an elderly woman, had spoken enthusiastically about going shopping with her rental grandchild. Then he remembered a television program he had seen, about a company called Family Romance, one of a number of agencies in Japan that rent out replacement relatives. ![]() Talking to the ladies was fun, but at the end of the night you were alone again, feeling stupid for having spent so much money. He thought he would feel better over time. Of course, he said, he still went to work every day, in the sales division of a manufacturing company, and he had friends with whom he could go out for drinks or play golf. He had a deep voice and a gentle, self-deprecating demeanor. “But when you end up alone you feel very lonely.” Tall and slightly stooped, Nishida was wearing a suit and a gray tie. “I thought I was a strong person,” Nishida told me, when we met one night in February, at a restaurant near a train station in the suburbs. Six months before that, their daughter, who was twenty-two, had left home after an argument and never returned. Two years ago, Kazushige Nishida, a Tokyo salaryman in his sixties, started renting a part-time wife and daughter. But our findings about Nishida, Shimada, and Ishii contradict fundamental aspects of these individuals’ stories, and broadly undermine the credibility of what they told us. We remain confident about the value of “A Theory of Relativity” as an exploration of ideas of family in Japan and more widely. The phenomenon of businesses in Japan that offer “rental” relatives to console the lonely and to provide other role-play services is well documented, and both Batuman and our fact checkers acted in good faith in their work. Shimada maintained that she was in fact an ongoing client of Family Romance, and Nishida said that he was a former client both said that they had changed their names to protect their privacy. Nishida and Shimada both admitted that they had given altered names, but said that their stories were otherwise true. He said that he had been supporting Shimada and her family, but did not give a clear answer as to whether they are married. ![]() Ishii denied any deception, and maintained that the interviewees were real clients. Upon learning this information, The New Yorker contacted all three people. Shimada is apparently married to Ishii, who also claimed in the piece to be single. What we uncovered suggests that Nishida and Shimada did not provide their real full names (which, out of respect for their privacy, we are withholding here), and that each is married, although they had claimed to be a lonely widower and a single mother, respectively. ![]() The New Yorker has now found strong evidence that Nishida, Shimada, and Ishii-central figures in the piece-made false biographical claims to Batuman and to a fact checker.
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