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

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There Is No Such Thing as an Easy Job was a blast of joy in my life that I needed just as much as the Spring sunshine finally arriving that coincided with reading this book. It’s offbeat and vaguely dark, but in a way that comforts me deeply and completely harmonizes with my own impressions on job cultures. The narrator’s personal life is teased out through the book, making her almost only a product of her employment than a person at times, but the reveal of her past career also brilliantly puts much of the narrative and her brand of observations into an even more meaningful context than I’d imagined. This was a blast and I honestly didn’t want it to ever end, slowly savoring each section and being as engulfed within the individual job culture as the narrator herself. While there is no easy job, this also arrives at some resignated conclusions about work (though I would have preferred more of a condemnation but hey) and this book is a lovely companion to help see you through all the absurdities and surrealism of your daily grind. Convenience Store Woman meets My Year of Rest and Relaxation in this strange, compelling, darkly funny tale of one woman's search for meaning in the modern workplace. Rather than doing the kind of job where I'd be involved with lots of people and become a central pillar of the establishment,I was [told I would be] better off in a role that I could fulfill calmly and peaceably ... and yet I couldn't help but feel that this position was turning out to be different than expected. A very contemporary and relatable, kind of love the variety of jobs. Also I love the way each having own problems and thrilling encounters-- the dvd scene and the author's personalities, of finding out the suddenly appearing and disappearing shops, collecting idea on trivia, that scam group of Lonely No More! and bewildering incident at the hut. Overall: good, but could've been better. I'll keep my eye on whatever Kikuko Tsumura comes out with next, though. I feel like she'd be really good at short stories.

Comparing this novel to the work of Ottessa Moshfegh or Sayaka Murata seems somewhat misleading, if a bit lazy.

Reviews

She is sent to an office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end isn't so easy. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly - how did she find herself in this situation in the first place? Kikuko Tsumara “experienced workplace harassment in her first job out of college, and quit after 10 months to retrain and find another position, an experience that inspired her to write stories about young writers.” So, why I liked the book was in part Tsumara’s writing style and she occasionally made me smile or laugh with her protagonist thinking funny thoughts or making funny observations… Here are a couple: Despite its blunders, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job did a laudable job of capturing the intricacies of the modern workplace. It grappled with several concerns such as workplace politics, discrimination, underemployment, and the romanticization of overwork. The episodic novel captured the universal workplace experience through the gaze of an unnamed narrator. Tsumura vividly portrayed highly relatable situations, both inside and outside of the workplace. Hovering above all of these concerns are the influences of capitalism. The novel had local flavors but it resonated on a universal scale. While not perfect, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job, as Tsumura’s first English-translate novel, sufficed as a primer for her prose.

She is sent to an office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end isn't so easy. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly – how did she find herself in this situation in the first place? I read this, quite honestly, at the absolute perfect time in my life. I finished my MA in december of 2020 and have felt incredibly burned out for about 6 months now - feeling overwhelmed at the smallest of tasks and finding it very hard to perform activities that I used to thrive in and love. I am also starting a brand new job in a brand new field in about 2 months. Reads like a breeze but I didn’t feel that the five loosely connected stories, of people being in general nicer than one imagines upfront, added up to something more in this novel An irreverent but thoughtful voice, with light echoes of Haruki Murakami ... the book is uncannily timely ... a novel as smart as is quietly funny' - Financial TimesThis deadpan novel follows a woman with burnout through five odd temporary jobs. It’s less surreal and picaresque in style than Temporary but has similar themes and spirit. The various types of work that the woman ends up doing neatly demonstrate how simultaneously mundane and strange paid employment can be. I liked the realistic way in which the jobs were never quite as advertised. Notably, one in which a product design role turned into writing an agony aunt column. In this book as in life, starting a new job means stepping into a pre-existing tangle of power dynamics, interpersonal relationships, and established processes that at first seem incomprehensible and bizarre. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is keenly observed and insightful throughout, for example:

A woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that requires no reading, no writing - and ideally, very little thinking. It feels like reading five novellas from the same storyteller but with five different characters, so earnestly told with easy narration. The narrator developed a burnout syndrome in her previous job that she goes quite specific and selective with her next job, although all five just menial and short-term it tells quite a view and detailed portrait of how a job is done.

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The narrator is, in some ways, a curious contemporary worker. She refuses to see her livelihood as either something to love or a form of exploitation. In her downtime at the park, she makes space for herself, taking long walks through the woods to study the grounds and meeting various characters who wander the property, searching for wild plants. Eventually, she notices the “unshakeable feeling” she got when she first developed burnout, of not wanting to work ever again, “gradually receding from my body,” and realizes the value of relinquishing some control. “You never knew what was going to happen,” she says. “You just had to give it your all, and hope for the best.” I feel the first story was actually not really needed (or doesn't resonate with the rest of the book) which is a shame because the deadpan tone and sarcasm in that part was my favoriet while reading. Like: After having to leave my old job because of burnout syndrome, I was rationally aware that it wasn’t a good idea to get too emotionally involved in what I was doing, but it was also difficult to prevent myself from taking satisfaction in it. Truthfully, I was happy when people took pleasure in my work, and it made me want to try harder.” ~ Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job 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:

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. PDF / EPUB File Name: Theres_No_Such_Thing_as_an_Easy_Job_-_Kikuko_Tsumura.pdf, Theres_No_Such_Thing_as_an_Easy_Job_-_Kikuko_Tsumura.epub This first job, The Surveillance Job, serves as a light and humorous way into our protagonist’s mind as we sit with her, chat with her colleagues, observe her habits, and get to know her routines, favourite foods, thoughts, feelings, opinions. This book tells the story of a young women in Japan who seeks out easy, non-stressful jobs. The book describes the five jobs she lands. I find it quite exceptional and intriguing-- learning about one's ups and downs, of meeting new circle of friends, new environment and challenge, to bear a sudden burden and annoyance from working and to learn that nothing in this world as easy as we wish it to be.What I liked about this novel is, in many ways, what I also didn't like about it. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is a very lowkey novel. It's not really concerned with reflecting on Big Picture stuff, but instead focuses on detailing the everyday life of its protagonist and her experiences with her various jobs. On the one hand, this is enjoyable to read about. Tsumura has a funny, jovial tone, most apparent when she highlights how trivial things can so easily become Matters of Monumental Importance when you're at work (there's a scene where the protagonist finds out from the guy she's surveilling that there's sausages on sale, so she goes to the store to get those sausages, but finds out that the sausages aren't on sale anymore because the footage she was watching was from the day before and it's a whole crisis lol). The biggest issue for me was that it felt like a book of four (long) short stories, rather than one piece of continuous writing. And as I'm rarely a big fan of short stories and tend to find collections of them frustrating to read, this probably explains my indifference towards the book. In the end the book reads very easy but just didn't work to a very satisfying (or surprising) conclusion, beside a very sweet version of "the journey is the destination", "everyone struggles" and "there are good people everywhere". The jobs she are peculiar and yet they never held my interest. I liked Temporary much more because the jobs the mc does there are really weird. Yet, I think I could have tolerated reading about a relatively ordinary workplace if the dialogues or mc's inner monologue had been amusing, as they are in Murata's novel (which managed to make tedious tasks entertaining).