There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Publisher Description
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'Surreal and unsettling' - Observer Cultural Highlight
'Wise, comical and exceptionally relatable' - Zeba Talkhani
'Quietly hilarious and deeply attuned to the uncanny rhythms and deadpan absurdity of the daily grind' - Sharlene Teo
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A 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 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?
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...
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'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 Times
'Polly Barton's translation skilfully captures the protagonist's dejected, anxious voice and her deadpan humour ... imaginative and unusual' - Times Literary Supplement
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tsumura's sharp English-language debut follows a woman's search for fulfillment in an all-consuming late-capitalist Japan. The unnamed narrator suffers career burnout at 36 and abandons her job (she's coy until the end about the details). When her unemployment insurance runs out, she reenters the workforce, seeking a position "that was practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not." What follows is a series of increasingly strange and occasionally surreal temporary gigs. In one, she monitors hours of video footage from surveillance cameras placed in an author's house and begins to find her preferences and identity merging with his; in another, she writes copy for voice advertisements on buses, but the businesses she's writing for mysteriously appear and disappear. Though she attempts to maintain emotional distance from her work, the narrator is drawn into a consuming series of workplace situations; while working on a maintenance crew for a national park, she encounters a man living in the woods who succumbed to a similar burnout. Tsumura's rendering of a millennial besieged by anxious overthinking and coping through deadpan humor and sarcasm rings true. As the monotonous and fantastic collide, Tsumura shows that meaning and real intrigue can be found in the unlikeliest of places.
