There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
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3.9 • 10 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"[A] 21st-century response to Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener.'" -NPR
"A thought-provoking, drily funny critique of capitalism and the systems of self-worth that are built around it." -TIME, "Must-Read Books of the Year"
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.
Her first gig--watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods--turns out to be inconvenient. (When can she go to the bathroom?) Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job--writing trivia for rice cracker packages; punching entry tickets to a purportedly haunted public park--it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful. And when she finally discovers an alternative to the daily grind, it comes with a price.
This is the first time Kikuko Tsumura--winner of Japan's most prestigious literary award--has been translated into English. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is as witty as it is unsettling--a jolting look at the maladies of late capitalist life through the unique and fascinating lens of modern Japanese culture.
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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.
