There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job: Kikuko Tsumura

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The Osaka-born author quit her first job less than one year in after suffering workplace harassment; a depressingly commonplace occurrence the world over. Now she writes poignant stories full of heart, humour, and frustration angled towards modern work culture. You never knew what was going to happen. Whatever you did, you just had to give it all, and hope for the best." A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing – and ideally, very little thinking. It offers a quiet mirror up to late-stage capitalism and Japanese work culture, but it’s actually far more concerned with looking at how each job offers its workers a chance to make change, to affect the world and to have fun (even if we have to make our own).

Though it is a novel, it does have a short story feel because of the structure. Each section of the book covers one job, and each one introduces us to a new cast of characters for our lead to interact with. I honestly was really enjoying this from the start. I found the first job interesting, the second a delightful bit of possible magical realism, the third extremely entertaining and the fourth darkly fascinating. I was about ready to give it four or possibly even five stars as I was just enjoying it all around. Then the final job hit and had it been a short story collection I would have given that section one… maybe two stars if I was being generous. I didn't find the cast of that section interesting (in contrast I loved most of the characters we were introduced to in the other jobs), I found the main focus of the job tedious, the mystery aspect boring and the end a bit on the preachy side. As she monitors the novelist’s life, she finds that the job fuels her “consumerist desires”. She watches him return home from shopping “as full of life as if he had been reborn”. She covets his impulse buys and the kinds of foods he eats. He has become an unknowing participant in a marketing scheme operating in secret out of his own life.For all its critique of the modern workplace, the resolution of There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is fairly conventional. Even while new jobs farther away from her original field, the narrator finds herself doing work more and more like what she trained for. She can’t help doing what she loves any more than she can help doing her best, even when she has resolved to do mindless work: A woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that requires no reading, no writing – and ideally, very little thinking.

Kikuko Tsumura was born in Osaka, Japan, where she still lives today. In her first job out of college, Tsumura experienced workplace harassment and quit after ten months to retrain and find another position, an experience that inspired her to write stories about young workers. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards including the Akutagawa Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize, and her first short story translated into English, 'The Water Tower and the Turtle', won a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology recognized Tsumura's work with a New Artist award in 2016. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is her first novel to be translated into English. Nobody’s life was untouched by loneliness; it was just a question of weather or not you were able to accept that loneliness for what it was. Put another way, everyone was lonely, and it was up to them whether they chose to bury that loneliness through relationships with other people, and if so, of what sort of intensity and depth.” ~ Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job It turns out that Polly Barton translated this book into English. I knew Polly Barton from Aoko Matsuda’s ‘Where the Wild Ladies Are’ (read and reviewed in January and I gave it 4 stars).

I loved the narrator almost instantly. Her dry, deadpan humour was hilarious to me. Another thing I liked was the messy, expressive way she describes feelings: