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fatma's Reviews > There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura
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bookshelves: translated, japanese

"I wanted a job that was practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not."

Based on what I knew of this book, I felt like it was pretty much destined to become a new favourite. It had all the right ingredients: Japanese fiction, translated by legend Polly Barton, THAT TITLE??, that cover???, a "strange, compelling, darkly funny tale of one woman's search for meaning in the modern workplace"--it felt like it was meant to be.

Alas, it wasn't. Maybe it was because I had such high expectations for this, but I couldn't help but feel disappointed by this novel. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is not a bad book; it just could've been a much better one. Its story is split into five sections, each following the protagonist's foray into a new job, and an oftentimes very strange one at that: there's the surveillance job, which involves the protagonist watching hours of surveillance footage of a writer at his apartment in order to find out where someone stashed a Very Important DVD; there's the cracker packet job, which involves the protagonist coming up with and writing trivia on the packet of a successful cracker's packaging--really, all the jobs the protagonist gets swept up in are bizarre, not because they're out-of-this-world outlandish, but because they are so weirdly specific. Clearly these jobs are, at least to a certain extent, presented to comedic effect in the novel, but I think Tsumura also highlights that work is in itself a very bizarre thing. There is a job out there for every single thing you could think of, and this novel certainly drives that reality home.

What I liked about this novel is, in many ways, what I also didn't like about it. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is a very lowkey novel. It's not really concerned with reflecting on Big Picture stuff, but instead focuses on detailing the everyday life of its protagonist and her experiences with her various jobs. On the one hand, this is enjoyable to read about. Tsumura has a funny, jovial tone, most apparent when she highlights how trivial things can so easily become Matters of Monumental Importance when you're at work (there's a scene where the protagonist finds out from the guy she's surveilling that there's sausages on sale, so she goes to the store to get those sausages, but finds out that the sausages aren't on sale anymore because the footage she was watching was from the day before and it's a whole crisis lol).

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.

Overall: good, but could've been better. I'll keep my eye on whatever Kikuko Tsumura comes out with next, though. I feel like she'd be really good at short stories.

Thank you so much to Bloomsbury for sending me a review copy of this in exchange for an honest review!
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Reading Progress

March 25, 2020 – Shelved as: to-read
March 25, 2020 – Shelved
June 22, 2020 – Shelved as: translated
July 1, 2020 – Shelved as: japanese
January 13, 2021 – Shelved as: novels-tbr
April 20, 2021 – Started Reading
April 22, 2021 – Finished Reading

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