Rented Selves

On Rental Family, Shusaku Endo and the Masks We Hold Onto

Makoto Fujimura | Spring 2026

Japan has always understood, in ways the West has only recently begun to articulate, that the self is not a fixed possession. Self is fluid but bound in society, shifting and altering depending on a context- It is something worn, performed, fitted to suit the circumstances. The word “tatemae”—the face one presents to the world—exists in Japanese precisely because the culture recognized that the presented self and the interior self are not the same thing. We, in the west might assume therefore that the Japanese perform a deceptive dance: I argue that the Japanese uniquely are unusually honest about the nature of masks. Like Noh theatre, an art form entirely dependent on masks, Japanese culture codified such theater into their ordinary lives.

Hikari’s film “Rental Family”, a Searchlight Pictures film now streaming after its 2025 theatrical release, takes this cultural fluency and presses it to its logical and aching conclusion. In Japan, there are now some three hundred businesses that operate on a simple premise: you need a presence in your life that is absent, and we will provide an actor to fill it. A father for a daughter who has none. A mourner for a funeral with too few. A friend for a dinner that cannot be faced alone. The service is called a rental family. It is, depending on how you hold it, such a phenomenon is either a profound tenderness or an indictment of everything modernity has quietly discarded.

Rental Family holds it as both, without resolution. That refusal to resolve is, I think, the film’s deepest integrity.

The Silence Endo Heard

When I wrote Silence and Beauty (IVPress), I was trying to discern what Shusaku Endo had actually heard in the voice cleverly hidden his story—not the apostasy of Fr. Rodrigues, not the theological crisis alone, but the particular sound of a culture that had learned, across centuries of persecution, to hide its faith beneath the surface of compliance. He admitted repeatedly in interviews that he himself is Kichijiro, one who vacillates in his faith, the one who is judged by priests and readers as the epitome of misery and failure.

The fumie—the image of Christ placed on the ground for suspected Christians to tread upon—was not simply a test. It was an instrument of mask-making. To step upon it was to perform an exterior self that contradicted the interior one. And Japan’s hidden Christians, the kakure kirishitan, learned to live inside that contradiction for over two hundred and fifty years.

What Endo perceived, and what I tried to trace in his work, is that this enforced mask-wearing did not simply produce hypocrisy. It produced a particular kind of interior depth—a soul formed in the pressure between what must be hidden and what cannot be destroyed. The mask, worn long enough and faithfully enough, begins to reshape what is beneath it. But it does not replace it. The face beneath remains. Wounded, certainly. Transformed, perhaps. But present.

I thought of Endo throughout watching Rental Family—not because the film engages his theology directly, but because it is made of the same material. Its protagonist, Phillip Vandarploeg, played effortlessly by Brendan Fraser, is an American actor who has lived in Tokyo for seven years without quite arriving. He is perpetually other—tall, conspicuous, and finally reduced to being hired as a “token white guy” by a rental agency run by the quietly simmering Shinji, played by Takehiro Hira. Phillip is, from his first appearance, a man wearing a mask. The mask is not Japanese: but is vacuously modern. It is the mask of the person who has not yet found the life he was supposed to be living.

The mask, worn long enough and faithfully enough, begins to reshape what is beneath it. But it does not replace it. The face beneath remains. Wounded, perhaps. Transformed, certainly. But present.

We Sell Emotion

Early in the film, Shinji explains the agency’s work to a skeptical Phillip. “We don’t sell people,” he says. “We sell emotion.”

The line is offered matter-of-factly, without irony. And it is, I think, the most theologically precise sentence in the film—because it names, with unembarrassed clarity, what the modern economy has always done and only recently began to admit.

We have been selling emotion for a very long time. We have been renting selves in our “attention economy”. The influencer rents a version of her life to her followers. The platform sells the feeling of connection without the cost of it. The father who cannot say “I love you” except through the grammar of gifts is also, in his way, renting an emotion he cannot otherwise afford to give. The question Rental Family poses—quietly, without polemics—is not whether this transaction is shameful. It is whether anything real can take root inside a rented life.

Endo asked the same question of the kakure kirishitan. They had performed the exterior rites of Buddhism and Shinto for generations, concealing their faith beneath layers of social obligation. When the Meiji government finally lifted the prohibition on Christianity in 1873 and the hidden Christians came forward, many of the Western missionaries who encountered them did not recognize what they found. The faith that had survived underground was strange, syncretized, unorthodox by any confessional standard. But it had survived. It had survived precisely because it had learned to wear masks without being consumed by them. No matter how odd and strange, some form of faith remained, hidden and subsumed, I argue, the modern Japanese embraced as their own.

Phillip learns something similar. He enters the rental agency as a man performing performances—an actor playing the role of an actor pretending to be a father, a friend, a mourner. But the clients he serves are not performing. Their grief is real. Their longing for a father is real. Their need for someone to simply show up is real. And in the pressure between his performance and their reality, something begins to happen to Phillip that he did not contract for.

The Theology of the Mask

In Japan, the mask has never been merely concealment. The Nōh theater mask is one of the great spiritual technologies of human culture: a fixed expression that, through movement and light and the performer’s interior life, becomes capable of carrying grief, joy, rage, and tenderness simultaneously. The mask does not hide the performer. It reveals the true face. It removes the distraction of his personal expressiveness and demands that meaning come through form, through discipline, through the silence of a face that cannot change.

This is what I tried to articulate in Silence and Beauty as the “silence beneath the silence”—not the silence of God’s absence, which is how Fr Rodrigues initially interprets the suffering around him, but the silence of God’s presence in a form that Western theological categories were not equipped to recognize. The trampled Christ of the fumie speaks to Rodrigues from beneath his own feet: “Go ahead. Step. I more than anyone know the pain in your foot.” (My own translation) It is not the silence of abandonment. It is the silence of solidarity—of a God who has entered the mask, stepped onto the Nōh stage, who has worn the full weight of human concealment, and who is present precisely in the place where presence seems most impossible.

Hikari does not make this argument explicitly. She is too skilled a filmmaker for that. But Rental Family is built on the same intuition. The rented presence—the actor who shows up as a father, a mourner, a friend—is not simply a fraud. He is also, in some real sense, a vessel. The client’s need calls something real out of him. What begins as performance becomes, in its faithfulness to the role, something that exceeds the role. Phillip does not simply pretend to love Mia, the young girl whose mother has hired him to be the father she has never had. He becomes, slowly and irreversibly, someone who has loved her. The mask becomes the face.

What begins as performance becomes, in its faithfulness to the role, something that exceeds the role. The mask becomes the face.

This is not sentimentality. It is, I would argue, a form of incarnational logic. The Word did not simulate flesh. The Word became flesh—took on the full weight of embodied, particular, vulnerable human life—and was transformed by that taking-on in ways that theology has spent two millennia trying to adequately describe. The Incarnation is not a performance. But it is a kind of mask-wearing: the infinite wearing the finite, the eternal wearing the temporal, presence wearing the form of absence. And it is precisely in the wearing that the love becomes real.

The Cost of Renting

The film is not without its tensions. There is a thread of genuine ethical unease running through Rental Family that a more conventional film would resolve too quickly, and which Hikari is careful not to entirely dispel. The agency worker Aiko, played by Mari Yamamoto, carries a disillusionment that the film allows to remain partially unresolved. She has worn the mask longer. She knows what it costs. Her quiet exhaustion grows as an immediate counterpoint to Phillip’s arc of rediscovery—a reminder that the rented self has a price that is paid over time, in the slow erosion of the boundary between who you are and who you have been paid to be.

In Culture Care I wrote about the artist’s need to resist the utilitarian instrumentalization of the imagination—the reduction of the self to its mere usefulness. Aiko embodies that cost. She is a woman whose gift for presence, for empathetic attunement to strangers’ needs, has been placed in the service of a transaction. The gift has not disappeared. But it has been rented so many times that she no longer knows quite who holds the title.

This is the cultural diagnosis the film offers, and it is not confined to Japan. We are all, trapped in the utilitarian pragmatism of our algorithmic making, in some version of this arrangement. We rent our attention to platforms that sell it. We rent our emotions to content that harvests them. We perform versions of ourselves calibrated to the expectations of invisible audiences, and we do it so habitually that we can no longer always locate the face beneath the performed one. That is why, despite all the “connections” that social media promises, we are more empty and achingly lonely in underneath our masks of success. The rental economy is not a Japanese phenomenon. It is the inevitable logic of techno frenzied cyber world, made visible by a blatantly honest, or deceptively hidden, algorithm to capitalize on it.

What Endo Hoped For

Endo spent his life as a Catholic writer in a country that had no cultural category for what he was. He was, in his own words, a man wearing a suit that did not fit—Western faith in a Japanese body, Christian imagination in a Buddhist and Shinto landscape. He obsessed over the hidden Christians not only because they fascinated him historically but because they were people he found strangely familiar and strange at the same time: people who had learned to carry something real inside an exterior that did not express it, people who had discovered that the face you wear for the world and the face you wear before God need not be identical, and that the discrepancy between them, held faithfully, can itself become a form of prayer. They survived, like Kichijiro, by incarnating their masks into a generational liturgy.

What Endo hoped for—what I tried to trace in Silence and Beauty—was not the removal of the mask. He was too Japanese, and too honest, for that hope. What he hoped for was the transformation of the mask from instrument of concealment into instrument of witness. The face that has been pressed against the fumie and survived carries, in its very surface, the mark of what it has been pressed against. It has been shaped by what it touched in the act of trampling. The wound becomes the testimony. And such embossed wounds can be a portal into Christ’s Presence, and “God’s strength made perfect” (2 Corinthians 12:9) in them.

Phillip Vandarploeg, at the end of Rental Family, has not resolved his life. He has not found the starring role he came to Japan to find. He has not become Japanese, and Japan has not become fully legible to him. Shinji’s early observation holds: you could live in Tokyo for hundreds of years and still not uncover all of its secrets. But Phillip has been changed by the roles he wore. He has loved, provisionally and impermanently and with full knowledge of the contract’s limits, and the love was real. He carries that now. It is not a resolution. It is a beginning.

What Endo hoped for was not the removal of the mask—but its transformation from instrument of concealment into instrument of witness.

Hikari, who is herself a Japanese director working between cultures, seems to understand this precisely. Rental Family is not a film about the redemption of inauthenticity. It is a film about what can pass through a rented self if the self is willing to be genuinely present inside the role. It is, in the deepest sense, a film about incarnation: about the possibility that faithfulness to a form—even a form you did not choose, even a form that began as transaction—can become, over time and through love, the form of your actual life.

The Face Beneath

I am a Japanese American painter trained in the Nihonga tradition—a tradition that is itself a kind of mask, or perhaps a kind of layering: thin applications of mineral pigment, each one incomplete, each one requiring the next, the image emerging not from a single decisive gesture but from an accumulation of translucent presences. The face of the painting is not the first layer. Nor the last. It is the relationship between all of them—the way each refractive layer holds and is held by what came before and what will come after.

I think of this when I think of the kakure kirishitan, and of Phillip Vandarploeg, and of every artist who has had to learn that the self given to the work and the self performing the work are not always distinguishable, and that the indistinguishability is not a failure of integrity but a form of faithfulness.

We all wear masks. We all, in one way or another, rent ourselves to the lives we are living—to the roles demanded of us by family, by culture, by economy, by history. The question Culture Care has always pressed is not whether the mask can be removed. It is whether, beneath the mask, something is still being tended. Whether the interior life is still being cultivated. Whether the face we wear before the Audience of One is still, however quietly, the truest thing we carry.

Rental Family surely does not answer that question. It holds it open, though, with mercy. And in a cultural moment that answers everything instantly and forgets everything by morning, that act of holding open is itself a form of grace.

Rental Family is now streaming on Hulu.

Makoto Fujimura is a painter, author, and founder of IAMCultureCare. His book Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering (IVP, Aldersgate Prize) reads Shusaku Endo’s work through the lens of Japanese aesthetics and theology, and he is currently working on a second edition. His new book Beauty and Justice, co-authored with Haejin Shim Fujimura, is published this month by Brazos Press.