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Anna'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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really liked it
bookshelves: fiction, japanese-lit

This deadpan novel follows a woman with burnout through five odd temporary jobs. It’s less surreal and picaresque in style than Temporary but has similar themes and spirit. The various types of work that the woman ends up doing neatly demonstrate how simultaneously mundane and strange paid employment can be. I liked the realistic way in which the jobs were never quite as advertised. Notably, one in which a product design role turned into writing an agony aunt column. In this book as in life, starting a new job means stepping into a pre-existing tangle of power dynamics, interpersonal relationships, and established processes that at first seem incomprehensible and bizarre. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is keenly observed and insightful throughout, for example:

"That must be really tough," the young woman said.
Amazingly, I felt my mood improve slightly. So, I thought, I’ve been wanting sympathy, have I? So far, the only person who’d offered me straightforward sympathy about the inappropriate relationship I’d formed with my work was Mrs. Masakado. I should probably have talked to my friends about it, but they were almost all of a similar age to me, and were also just gritting their teeth and clinging on as best they could, so it hardly felt right to drone on about my problems. Besides, I didn’t want to worry them. I had one friend who was currently enduring a situation even worse than the one I encountered in my old workplace. Whereas I’d ended up quitting with burnout syndrome, she was still hanging on in there. Even in the past, when my friends had been kind enough to say that what I was going through sounded tough, I’d always felt morally indebted to them in some way, because what they were going through was, in point of fact, tougher. In contrast, the sympathy I got here may have been superficial, but it came without fetters, and thus felt easy to accept.


That’s a very relatable millennial sentiment. I found the bus advertising job the most appealing chapter, as this had a pleasing mysteriousness. The final chapter ends the novel in a satisfying manner, as the narrator reveals the job that burned her out and appears to be recovering from that experience. I do enjoy 21st century fiction narrated by a woman that centres her job without glorifying it as a high-flying career. Such books examine the significant, often dominant, presence that paid work (OK, terrible, or a mixture of both) has on our lives. In this sub-genre I would recommend Temporary, Jillian, The New Me, and The Disaster Tourist. Each author on this list takes a distinctive angle on life at work. I really enjoyed Tsumura’s.
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Reading Progress

March 7, 2021 – Shelved
March 7, 2021 – Shelved as: to-read
April 17, 2022 – Started Reading
April 19, 2022 – Finished Reading
April 25, 2022 – Shelved as: fiction
April 25, 2022 – Shelved as: japanese-lit

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