There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

Paperback, 300 pages

Published April 20, 2021 by Bloomsbury Publishing.

ISBN:: 978-1-5266-2224-2

(1 review)

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 …

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...

3 editions

pdotb@wyrms.de reviewed There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura

Not everyone's cup of tea, perhaps, but it was mine!

4 stars

Follows the narrator through five short-term contract jobs, specifically chosen to be undemanding after she quit her career through burnout. Apart from the stories being genuinely quite charming, I think they also offer an interesting reflection of the nature of our relationship with work and with colleagues. The writing style felt somehow a little flat, though I thought that could be read as portraying the narrator's likely mood. Anyway, I really enjoyed it and I'm only sorry there don't seem to be any more of the author's books available in English.