276°
Posted 20 hours ago

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

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Nobody's life was untouched by loneliness; it was just a question of weather or not you were able to accept that loneliness for what it was. Put another way, everyone was lonely, and it was up to them whether they chose to bury that loneliness through relationships with other people, and if so, of what sort of intensity and depth.’ I feel the first story was actually not really needed (or doesn't resonate with the rest of the book) which is a shame because the deadpan tone and sarcasm in that part was my favoriet while reading. Like: 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. Despite its blunders, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job did a laudable job of capturing the intricacies of the modern workplace. It grappled with several concerns such as workplace politics, discrimination, underemployment, and the romanticization of overwork. The episodic novel captured the universal workplace experience through the gaze of an unnamed narrator. Tsumura vividly portrayed highly relatable situations, both inside and outside of the workplace. Hovering above all of these concerns are the influences of capitalism. The novel had local flavors but it resonated on a universal scale. While not perfect, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job, as Tsumura’s first English-translate novel, sufficed as a primer for her prose. However, despite the concerns raised in the novel, not all were fully resolved; there were also some mysteries that were never resolved. Tsumura didn’t dive deep into these concerns and just skimmed the surface. Because of the novel’s structure, the five distinct parts read like separate short stories. They were all readable but there were some that were more interesting than the others. The conclusions arrived at were predictable, contrasting the intricate critique of the modern workplace that Tsumura has captured. But while the conclusion can be seen as predictable, it was also inevitable as the narrator submitted herself to her view of the workplace, a palpable offshoot of capitalism.

With each job we see how it’s inevitable to become too invested. Ideas or possible mysteries catch her attention (is there a ghost in the park? How to stop the predator lurking at bus stops?) and lead to obsessions, and it even explores that awkward feeling that spending your own money is needed to get a feel for the job. I was gripped by the story of the postering job turning into a rivalry with the ominous, vaguely threatening and ‘ self-aggrandizing’ vibes of the Lonely No More group that seemed to prey on the loneliness of older people on her route and couldn’t put down the book as I was just as invested in her figuring out who they were as she was. There is this excellently executed off-putting vibe that reminded my of college youth groups marketing themselves in the dorm halls where you’d feel bad at first when people were mean to them but then saw they sort of got off on it in a weird way and it just…felt eerie and awkward. Had this section been expanded as an entire novel I would not have minded. Each story stands as uniquely awesome (the middle few the best) but this one just hit the mark for me. I also found it interesting how much the novel hinted at privatization putting a lot of social service duties on untrained employees who end up looking for missing people or stopping a wave of crime. 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. I came to like this book. I thought the author was pretty funny at times. When she writes another novel, which I hope she does, I’ll be right in line to get it and read it. 😊 Interestingly, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job was her first novel to be translated into English despite a prolific career that started as early as 2005. In her native Japan, Tsumura is a highly-heralded writer. She has won several awards for her works. It was easy to understand as her novel was absorbing. She was able to vividly capture the workplace atmosphere with a deadpan gaze. There was also a sprinkling of dry humor, cynicism, and surrealism in the novel. The story echoed on a global scale because some of its elements were derived from the author’s own experiences in her first job. 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. In the end the book reads very easy but just didn't work to a very satisfying (or surprising) conclusion, beside a very sweet version of "the journey is the destination", "everyone struggles" and "there are good people everywhere". 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. 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. Her first “easy job” is as a machine of the surveillance state. She monitors every moment of a half-baked novelist’s life, looking for evidence that he is unwittingly assisting a criminal enterprise by storing contraband in a DVD case. The surveillance firm could search his home, but they are overwhelmed by the size of his film collection. The job is transparently unnecessary.

When we enter the story, she is working in a surveillance company and has been tasked with watching footage from hidden cameras which were installed in the house of a novelist.

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). 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?

Nobody’s life was untouched by loneliness; it was just a question of weather or not you were able to accept that loneliness for what it was. Put another way, everyone was lonely, and it was up to them whether they chose to bury that loneliness through relationships with other people, and if so, of what sort of intensity and depth.” ~ Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job It offers a quiet mirror up to late-stage capitalism and Japanese work culture, but it’s actually far more concerned with looking at how each job offers its workers a chance to make change, to affect the world and to have fun (even if we have to make our own).

Reviews

As she monitors the novelist’s life, she finds that the job fuels her “consumerist desires”. She watches him return home from shopping “as full of life as if he had been reborn”. She covets his impulse buys and the kinds of foods he eats. He has become an unknowing participant in a marketing scheme operating in secret out of his own life. Tsumura has also written a score of short stories. Her 2013short story Kyūsuitō to kame ( The Water Tower and the Turtle) won the 39th Kawabata Yasunari Prize. It was also her first work to be translated into English and it won her a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. In 2016, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology recognized her works by awarding her a New Artist award. A woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that requires no reading, no writing - and ideally, very little thinking. This job even got me wondering about who the person was that must have written the jokes printed on Penguin bars (Brits over 25 will know what I’m talking about). Though it is a novel, it does have a short story feel because of the structure. Each section of the book covers one job, and each one introduces us to a new cast of characters for our lead to interact with. I honestly was really enjoying this from the start. I found the first job interesting, the second a delightful bit of possible magical realism, the third extremely entertaining and the fourth darkly fascinating. I was about ready to give it four or possibly even five stars as I was just enjoying it all around. Then the final job hit and had it been a short story collection I would have given that section one… maybe two stars if I was being generous. I didn't find the cast of that section interesting (in contrast I loved most of the characters we were introduced to in the other jobs), I found the main focus of the job tedious, the mystery aspect boring and the end a bit on the preachy side.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment