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There's No Such Thing As an Easy Job

There's No Such Thing As an Easy Job 1

by Kikuko Tsumura
Paperback
Publication Date: 26/11/2020
4/5 Rating 1 Review

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A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that requires no reading, no writing – and ideally, very little thinking.

She is sent to a nondescript 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 can be so inconvenient and tiresome. 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?

As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful...

ISBN:
9781526622242
9781526622242
Category:
Classic fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
26-11-2020
Language:
English
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Country of origin:
United Kingdom
Pages:
416
Dimensions (mm):
214x137x32mm
Weight:
0.45kg

'Surreal and unsettling'
Observer Autumn Cultural Highlights

'Wise, comical and exceptionally relatable'
Zeba Talkhani, author of My Past is a Foreign Country

'Quietly hilarious and deeply attuned to the uncanny rhythms and deadpan absurdity of the daily grind'
Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

Kikuko Tsumura

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.

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1 Review

I kept asked myself while I was reading whether I was enjoying this book or not and I still don’t have a clear answer. It’s an easy book to summarise: a 36 year old woman is looking for a new job, having experienced burnout in her previous one. Each of the book’s five parts describe one of the jobs she tries out in her quest to find a job that’s not really a job.

“I wanted a job that was practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not.”

With a blurb that promised humour and made comparisons between this book and ‘Convenience Store Woman’, I had my hopes up. The funny bits, if they were there, must have gone straight over my head; no giggles, chuckles, or guffaws accompanied my reading.

I absolutely loved ‘Convenience Store Woman’ and I can see why you might mention the two books in the same breath. Sort of. Both women are 36 and the focus of both stories is on their jobs but, while I loved the Smile Mart’s Keiko, I never really got a sense of this book’s cushy job seeker’s personality.

“Whoever you were, there was a chance that you would end up wanting to run away from a job you had once believed in, that you would stray from the path you were on.”

One of the parts seemed to be heading into magical realism territory but the others didn’t so I wasn’t quite sure whether I was seeing something in that part that wasn’t really there. This was a quick read for me but ultimately I don’t think it’s going to be a memorable one.

I’m rounding up from 3.5 stars.

Contains Spoilers No
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