You remember that story about Japan’s rent-a-family industry, right? In 2018, The New Yorker published Elif Batuman’s account of lonely Japanese hiring actors to pretend like husbands, wives, sons, daughters for a day or more. This week, the magazine attached a note to the piece explaining that several people interviewed by Batuman had lied:

“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. 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. 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. Nishida and Shimada both ­admitted that they had given altered names, but said that their stories were otherwise true. 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.”

However, The New Yorker went on to defend the story: “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. We remain confident about the value of ‘A Theory of Relativity’ as an exploration of ideas of family in Japan and more widely. 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.”

Ryu Spaeth disagrees: “I knew, before I even clicked on Batuman’s article, that it was off; that it would not correspond with reality as I know it as a Japanese person. Now that we know much of the story is bunk, it’s worth examining how such a skewed depiction of a country sailed right over the heads of writers, fact-checkers, editors, and award-givers alike.

“Here I am betraying my own biases toward a tiresome journalistic genre: the story that depicts Japan as a menagerie of the weird, the alien, the freakish. In the Western imagination, Japan is rife with shut-ins, celibates, suicides, loners, and obsessive geeks. It is the place where the men fall in love with busty Power Rangers, and the women vanish like ghosts into the gloomy mist of the suicide forest. These stories both satisfy a base appetite for the odd and serve as a projection of Western anxieties about the dissolution of the nuclear family particularly and society more broadly. The future, it seems, is already playing out in Japan, where people are atomized, neutered, and lost in the various fantasies playing out on their glowing screens.

“I don’t doubt the veracity of these stories, but I am deeply skeptical of the way they are often framed: to maximize the inherent strangeness of the Japanese.”

In other news: Cyberpunk 2077 was released late last week after over five years of buildup. It was supposed to be the gaming release of the year, perhaps even the decade. Yesterday, Sony announced it was refunding all purchases of the game. What happened? “When the game’s first reviews came out just before its December 10 release, they were mostly positive. It turned out, however, that this was because reviewers were only given early access to the Windows PC version, the one best optimized and representative of the expansive, graphically intensive game’s potential. Once the game was released on consoles as well (PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), players discovered a litany of technical issues. Characters’ faces were obscured, some environments were unsightly. The game would make consoles crash repeatedly, sacrificing players’ progress.”

Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau relaunch their publishing house: “Last year, after Penguin Random House shut down the literary imprint Spiegel & Grau, the veteran editors Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau pondered what to do next. Splitting up was never something they considered. Ms. Spiegel and Ms. Grau have worked together for the past 25 years, first as founding editors and publishers of Riverhead Books . . . Other publishers were eager to recruit them. Instead, they decided to revive Spiegel & Grau on their own. This week, Ms. Spiegel and Ms. Grau announced that they are back in business — this time, as an independent publishing house with a much broader definition of what publishing entails.”

James Matthew Wilson completes the “Poetry and News” discussion over at Theopolis with more on Ezra Pound: “Pound desired an immanent, pagan, and materialist theory of history, one that could confer permanence on history and literature without implying transcendence.”

Does religious liberty have a future? Adam White: “Today . . . many Americans’ commitment to toleration is, at best, contingent. Ginsburg spoke for many who want to ‘reform’ the federal RFRA to clear paths for progressive policy on matters of contraception, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The same people view newly proposed state RFRAs as acts not of tolerance but intolerance. In their eyes, Religious Freedom Restoration Acts of any kind have become an undue burden on the free exercise of progressivism. For now, the Little Sisters and other religious people can breathe sighs of relief, having won this latest case. But how long can they rely on the protections of RFRA, or on the First Amendment that undergirds it?”

Will instant messaging finally kill the letter? “The art of letter writing has died many times over: with the introduction of the penny post, the telegram, the telephone, the email. It seems that the end of letters as a literary form has been lamented for almost as long as the form has been in use, with each improvement in speed, reliability or facility taken as anathema to the letter’s insistence on slow contemplation.  It’s no wonder that we’re desperate to eulogize it: authors’ letters are integral to literature’s myth-making; they build a meta-narrative that offers a glimpse into the genius of the creative process. As well as a way to deepen understanding of an individual and their work, they have always been a repository of both salacious rumours and petty rivalries; a bedroom curtain twitched aside, a seat at a dinner party none of us were invited to. Reading authors’ letters is sometimes envisioned as a way to ‘bring the dead back to life’, an aim Jonathan Ellis both celebrates and warns against in his book Letter Writing Among Poets (2015). They encourage a kind of hazy romanticization, as if they were the key to an ultimate understanding of a body of work.  Once, back when email was new, it was commonly said that this new medium would be if not the killer of letters then their vampire, adopting the same fundamental principles in layout and cribbing their vocabulary: mailbox, address, delivery, cc. But, surface similarities aside, emails appeared in fact to be the antithesis of letters: instantaneous and impersonal.”

Photo: Wismar in winter