This article is part of Afar, A Retrospective. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do. Could be a religious tract or a laminated ransom note.
But I am entirely at ease. I owe this to my friend Miyabi. For the past five years she has been a professional rent-a-friend, working for a company called Client Partners. My lunch mate pokes daintily at her curry and speaks of the friends whose money came before mine. You know, a normal, companionable, year-old friend. She has been paid to cry at funerals and swoon at weddings, lest there be shame over a paltry turnout.
Last year, a high schooler hired her and 20 other women just long enough to snap one grinning, peace-sign-flashing, I-totally-have-friends Instagram photo. Every day in Japan, it seems, some weird new appetite is identified and gratified.
There are cats to rent, after all, used underwear to purchase, owls to pet at owl bars. Handsome men will wipe away the tears of stressed-out female office workers. All to say I expected something more or less goofy when I lined up several English-speaking rent-a-friends for my week in Tokyo.
The agency Miyabi works for exists primarily for lonely locals, but the service struck me as well suited to a solo traveler, too, so I paid a translator to help with the arrangements. Listening on a long walk. Photo by Landon Nordeman. As a girl, Miyabi longed to be a flight attendantβContinental, for some reasonβand that tidy solicitousness still emanates. She wears a smart gray skirt and a gauzy beige blouse over which a sheet of impeccable hair drapes weightlessly.
