There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job: Kikuko Tsumura

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Really love the narrator's character though at some point her raving (as the conflicts/tensions mainly from her works and thoughts) are too much but it was understandable. Mrs Masakado, the recruiter also my another favourite-- she's quite helpful and so understanding. She begins to see real change in the world because of the work she does. But then things go wrong, because workplaces are complicated. We can’t control our colleagues or even the work itself, and things change. This is all well and good except this kind of narrative style ultimately bogged this book down for me. The story started to feel too episodic, especially because each of the protagonist's five jobs gets its own separate chapter; you start to get tired of the same exact plot trajectory every time: the protagonist finds a job, she works there, shenanigans ensue, she leaves the job for whatever reason, and then she finds a new job, ad infinitum. What I was missing from this novel was some kind of overarching narrative, something to tie its string of events together. By the time I finished There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job, I was left especially underwhelmed because it didn't feel like there was a takeaway. What was I supposed to get from this story? I'm not sure, which is so disappointing because there's definitely something there; it just needed to be more substantially contextualized so it didn't end up feeling like a bunch of stories about a woman working at a bunch of jobs. The biggest issue for me was that it felt like a book of four (long) short stories, rather than one piece of continuous writing. And as I'm rarely a big fan of short stories and tend to find collections of them frustrating to read, this probably explains my indifference towards the book. On the surface, the jobs that the protagonist found herself in seemed easy. They promised to be routinary, hence, the protagonist can emotionally disconnect from the work she was performing. Her old job left her emotionally drained. However, things were never meant to be. As she would soon realize, each job had its own set of challenges. There were also jobs that can be emotionally demanding. There were realities she cannot seem to escape from. The more she stayed, the more she found herself emotionally invested. She found herself absorbed by her job, her workmates, and the intricacies of workplace politics. Rather than apathy, she cared for her job and the people she worked with. As the book’s title echoed, there is no such thing as an easy job.

Rather than doing the kind of job where I'd be involved with lots of people and become a central pillar of the establishment,I was [told I would be] better off in a role that I could fulfill calmly and peaceably ... and yet I couldn't help but feel that this position was turning out to be different than expected. This first job, The Surveillance Job, serves as a light and humorous way into our protagonist’s mind as we sit with her, chat with her colleagues, observe her habits, and get to know her routines, favourite foods, thoughts, feelings, opinions. She is sent to a nondescript office building and tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But watching someone for hours isn’t as easy as it sounds. 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?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? Of course, all the way through There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job, we aren’t just moving from job to job but also sharing headspace with a slowly changing woman as she gets caught up with complications and personal drama; as she leaps or stumbles over hurdles; as she goes on searching for her ideal easy job. Following our main protagonist as she discussed her own difficulties with burnout and the work force, and as she got job after job, it was so incredibly refreshing, eye opening, and helpful to see her thought process slowly changing, and how she came to feel about each job, and herself, in turn. And that's about all there is to it. Despite the seemingly topical setup (burnout, financial concerns, an older millennial protagonist), encapsulated in lines such as 'Money was of utmost importance to me right now. I had no idea when I might burn out next', this is not a novel that seeks to say anything about either its protagonist or society in general. The narrator remains nameless; her friends and parents are mentioned only in passing; we don't find out the nature of her previous job until the very end of the story, and we learn little about what burnout was like for her. In another job she climbs out of a window to escape a certain situation and because the space between buildings is too narrow, she gets out of there sideways like a crab and all I could hear in my head was Zoidberg going woop woop woop.

She has won 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. https://granta.com/the-water-tower-an... (Granta Issue 148, Online Version, 9/2/2019) Job 4: Puts up posters in neighborhoods and finds out she’s in competition with a company that puts up posters for their scam project of ripping old lonely people off. Polly Barton’s engaging and readable translation makes sufficient use of Britishisms—”bloody”, “moreish” for “tasty”, “skive off” for “to skip work”—to briefly draw the reader out of a Japanese life and into an incongruously British one. I loved the narrator almost instantly. Her dry, deadpan humour was hilarious to me. Another thing I liked was the messy, expressive way she describes feelings:

The Osaka-born author quit her first job less than one year in after suffering workplace harassment; a depressingly commonplace occurrence the world over. Now she writes poignant stories full of heart, humour, and frustration angled towards modern work culture. The jobs she are peculiar and yet they never held my interest. I liked Temporary much more because the jobs the mc does there are really weird. Yet, I think I could have tolerated reading about a relatively ordinary workplace if the dialogues or mc's inner monologue had been amusing, as they are in Murata's novel (which managed to make tedious tasks entertaining).

Job 2: Writing copy for businesses that wanted to advertise on a circulating bus (a bus that traveled a certain route within the city) After having to leave my old job because of burnout syndrome, I was rationally aware that it wasn’t a good idea to get too emotionally involved in what I was doing, but it was also difficult to prevent myself from taking satisfaction in it. Truthfully, I was happy when people took pleasure in my work, and it made me want to try harder.

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Tsumura eloquently contrasts her depictions of male prejudice with examples of female solidarity. The protagonist's deep respect for Ms. Eriguchi — her colleague at the bus company — is based on the latter's intellect, acumen, and kindness, notwithstanding her youth. Overall, however, the author is careful not to make her feminist message too explicit. Comparisons to Convenience Store Woman are perhaps inevitable, but mainly because this is a Japanese novel about a woman who rejects what's expected of her (career-wise, at least). Kikuko Tsumura's narrator and plot don't bear much resemblance to Sayaka Murata's. Another obvious reference is Temporary (same setup, much more surreal), but I was most reminded of meandering, oddly charming novels of modern life such as Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and The New Me. Reads like a breeze but I didn’t feel that the five loosely connected stories, of people being in general nicer than one imagines upfront, added up to something more in this novel In this, Tsumura’s story resists the economic determinism of the American office novel, which tends to draw attention to the deadening employment ecosystem its characters are a part of. Colleagues and bosses range from indifferent to mean to abusive, and co-worker friendships are typically predicated on mutual suffering. One of the pleasures of reading Tsumura is her focus, instead, on the care in ostensibly meaningless jobs. She treats boring, unextraordinary people in boring, unextraordinary jobs with an enchantment that many contemporary novels about work seem to actively avoid. Tsumura's advocacy aspires toward incremental, harmonious change, granting her characters a congenial caper from the duty-bound tenets of Japanese work culture. Polly Barton's British translation, having words such as a total tip (a complete mess); was not half convenient (was very convenient); moreish (tasty); skiver (a job shirker); and put paid to (finish) serves as a weirdly appropriate lens to approach the novel. This double distancing effect — British flavor imposed on a Japanese oeuvre — encourages us to imagine the voice of Tsumura's narrator/avatar as both cheeky and self-deprecating, the perfect balance to wage a stealth feminist revolution.