As a result of this revelation, the magazine began an investigation into whether similar misrepresentations had been made for its article. Shimada is apparently married to Ishii, who also claimed in the piece to be single. Upon learning this information, The New Yorker contacted all three people.
Ishii denied any deception, and maintained that the interviewees were real clients. He said that he had been supporting Shimada and her family, but did not give a clear answer as to whether they are married. 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.
Two years ago, Kazushige Nishida, a Tokyo salaryman in his sixties, started renting a part-time wife and daughter. His real wife had recently died. Six months before that, their daughter, who was twenty-two, had left home after an argument and never returned. He had a deep voice and a gentle, self-deprecating demeanor.
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. But at night he was completely alone. He thought he would feel better over time. Instead, he felt worse. He tried going to hostess clubs. 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.
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. One client, an elderly woman, had spoken enthusiastically about going shopping with her rental grandchild. Nishida contacted Family Romance and placed an order for a wife and a daughter to join him for dinner. The cost was forty thousand yen, about three hundred and seventy dollars. The wife asked Nishida for details about how she and the daughter should act.
