There's No Such Thing As An Easy Job - Kikuko Tsumura

 

Description

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

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.

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...

TRANSLATED FROM JAPANESE BY POLLY BARTON

Review

On the face of it this novel shouldn't be that interesting, the jobs in the book certainly aren't. Yet because it's been written about someone in Japan it's just fascinating!

I loved this book and am sorry to finish it. I'm not sure we ever learn the name of the lady in the book, but she wants "an easy job" not because she is lazy but because she has suffered from burnout in her previous career. 

Each of the jobs she gets are very tedious and yet she manages to excel at them and had me rivetted to the book in the process. The first job where she watched endless hours of surveillance on a man in his apartment, had me wondering like her - what was he doing? Would they find the right DVD case?

The next job writing for the adverts played on buses may seem to the Westerner pointless. But this is Japan and there is a quiet on a bus that we do not have in the Western world, so of course the adverts can be heard perfectly. Meanwhile she enters a kind of twilight zone with this job.

So it goes on, each job a little more intriguing, but will she find one she wants to stick at? I find myself describing these events like they really happened - the writing was so good (and the translation) that I forgot I was reading a work of fiction.  If you liked Convenience Store Woman then this is in the same vein. If you like you books to have no grey areas - no wondering "could that really happen" and firmly set in the real world, then it's not for you.

I'm giving this book 5 out of 5 stars. My thanks to netgalley for the ARC to review.