There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, Kikuko Tsumura’s latest novel, translated by Polly Barton, follows a nameless protagonist, who, in the wake of burnout from a job she’s worked at for 14 years, decides to quit. Her new mission is to find a job that “requires no reading, no writing, and ideally, very little thinking.”
Throughout the course of the novel, spanning a time period of one year, our protagonist will traverse through five different jobs, each one as mundane and as odd as the next one.
The first job our nameless heroine signs up for is in surveillance. She’s asked to sit in a room all day and monitor Yamae Yamamoto, a writer who’s being watched as he’s suspect of unknowingly receiving contraband by an acquaintance. Among the general inconveniences and boredom that come from having to watch a person live their quotidian life — especially that of a writer who spends most of his day staring at a computer screen— she begins picking up peculiar habits like getting hungry when the subject eats, letting his food choices dictate her personal eating habits, watching the same thing he’s watching on TV. Once the culprit is finally caught, she decides she doesn’t like the sudden spike of drama and action that comes after months of absolutely nothing happening or the intrusive involvement that comes from watching someone so closely all day.
So off she goes to her second job, a gig where she’s asked to write bus ads for new businesses. Just when that seems simple enough, on her very first day, her boss asks her to keep tabs on her coworker and to bring up any “funny” business she encounters. What our protagonist, at first, thinks is a vague and peculiar request, she soon finds out, is actually not baseless. New businesses are popping up out of nowhere, almost overnight, right as the ads come out; when the ads are removed, the businesses close down. Too weirded out by this paranormal oddity and the power that comes with it, she decides to move on to another job.
For the rest of the novel, the protagonist goes from writing advice akin to “life hacks” on the packets of rice crackers to replacing posters around a suburb, to surveilling a park on foot and noting any odd findings on a map. Each job coming to an odd end due to some reason that causes the protagonist to run, either spooked or once again, unsatisfied.
We’ve all fantasized, at some point, about having a job where very little is asked of us. There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job gives us a glimpse into what that would be like, though turning the concept on its head by incorporating some fantastical elements into some of the stories that border on magical realism. Every job starts off simple enough but quickly escalates into something bizarre.
“I wanted a job that was practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not.”― Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job
While an interesting and quirky idea, I have to admit that Tsumura’s book was not tailored for me. As a millennial, also once burned out from many years doing a job I hated, I hoped to be able to relate to this narrative. But alas, it left me wanting.
The content and ideas of the story were entertaining, but the writing itself seemed to drag on, making me wonder whether this book really needed to be 400 pages long. Too often, it seemed like Tsumura was hyper-focusing on inconsequential details that don’t seem to add much to the plot. She fixates on the specifics of the meals of the protagonist’s coworkers, or on the reactions of Yamae Yamamoto as he’s watching TV, or on the protagonist’s thought process on how to perforate tickets in a straight line. A self-professed “over-thinker,” we spend far too much time inside the protagonist’s head analyzing every single occurrence of her day, most of it ordinary.
Of the five different jobs, it was the one where she wrote bus ads that intrigued me the most. With its elements of mystery and magical realism, it was easily the most entertaining story as it kept me guessing with every turn of the page.
Overall, I found the prose too simple and straightforward for my taste, sometimes seeming as bland as the mundane tasks the protagonist is asked to do in each of her “easy” jobs. It lacked a certain wittiness that quirky stories need in order to hit the mark.
However, even though it’s my opinion that the writing falls flat, the general idea of the stories seems funny, which leads me to wonder if there’s perhaps some aspect of the prose that’s lost in translation, affecting the semantics, creating a punchline that just doesn’t translate the same sentiment into English.
On a more positive note, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is one of the most outside-the-lines piece of literature I’ve read in a long time, following no rehashed tropes, clichés, or easily recognizable or predictable plot. If you’re looking for something different, this is the book for you.