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JimZ's Reviews > There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
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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. 😊
This was a quiet read, and maybe I needed that, and it influenced my rating. But it was good writing, and while nothing much happened in this novel, I was immersed in the character (she was believable) and all of its characters.
I spied this book sitting on the library shelf when I was picking up my stash of books. I always go to the new book section because you never know…there might be something interesting there…. 😉
It turns out that Polly Barton translated this book into English. I knew Polly Barton from Aoko Matsuda’s ‘Where the Wild Ladies Are’ (read and reviewed in January and I gave it 4 stars).
When reading this book I was already forming my review in my head….and to start whining that the book was too long, 399 pages. But at the end, that complaint fell by the wayside. 🙃
This book tells the story of a young women in Japan who seeks out easy, non-stressful jobs. The book describes the five jobs she lands.
• Job 1: Surveilling a person (he is a writer) in his apartment who was slipped some contraband in a DVD container unbeknownst to him, and authorities have bugged his apartment with a camera, so they can determine when someone is going to pick it up, so they can nab the person. The protagonist has the mind-numbing job of watching his every movement (or lack thereof) in two rooms of his apartment.
• Job 2: Writing copy for businesses that wanted to advertise on a circulating bus (a bus that traveled a certain route within the city)
• Job 3: Working for a cracker company in which she is tasked to write interesting facts on the wrapper of crackers “that will interest both 10-years-olds and their 90-year-old grandmothers”. It’s funny…when she is told this she tries to figure out the likelihood that a 90-year-old grandma would have a 10-year-old grandkid…not very likely!!!
• 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.
• Job 5: Works for a national park/forest, and her job is to sit in a hut on the outskirts of the park and pick up people who get lost in the park.
I know I am not being terribly descriptive above, but these jobs are not very interesting which is part of the appeal to her for these jobs. It appears she just wants to get by in life. A love interest is not mentioned once in the novel. She lives at home with her parents, but her mother makes only brief appearances in the novel. I like the character — she does not come across as a jerk, she appears to be well-adjusted, and (view spoiler) .
So, why I liked the book was in part Tsumara’s writing style and she occasionally made me smile or laugh with her protagonist thinking funny thoughts or making funny observations… Here are a couple:
• Mr. Hakota, Mr. Nojima and Miss Kudo were all good sorts, although my only contact with them was the ten seconds when I said good morning to them at the headquarters, so I couldn’t rule out the possibility that they were actually bad sorts just pretending to be good.
• In the end, though, I didn’t read the magazine on the train ride home. It had been a very busy day — in addition to three lost people, I’d also had to deal with a man who’d buried his wedding ring on impulse in the forest, then decided he wanted it back and asked me to search for it with him. Frankly, I was exhausted. When I told Mr. Hakota (her boss) about the ring man, he calmly informed me that they got quite a few such people. Unable to bring themselves to throw away or sell their rings, not even fully convinced they were ready to get rid of them, they would come to bury them in the forest.
Notes
• Kikuko Tsumara “experienced workplace harassment in her first job out of college, and quit after 10 months to retrain and find another position, an experience that inspired her to write stories about young writers.”
• 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)
• Very nice interview with the author: https://www.bigissuenorth.com/reading...
• Website for Polly Barton although it seems to have stopped at 2017 but it looks like there’s a bunch of Japanese short stories to read that she has translated: https://www.pollybarton.net/?fbclid=I...
Reviews (everybody liked it! 😊… ):
• https://www.npr.org/2021/03/25/980832...
• https://samstillreading.wordpress.com...
• https://thenerddaily.com/review-there...
• https://booksandbao.com/review-theres...
This was a quiet read, and maybe I needed that, and it influenced my rating. But it was good writing, and while nothing much happened in this novel, I was immersed in the character (she was believable) and all of its characters.
I spied this book sitting on the library shelf when I was picking up my stash of books. I always go to the new book section because you never know…there might be something interesting there…. 😉
It turns out that Polly Barton translated this book into English. I knew Polly Barton from Aoko Matsuda’s ‘Where the Wild Ladies Are’ (read and reviewed in January and I gave it 4 stars).
When reading this book I was already forming my review in my head….and to start whining that the book was too long, 399 pages. But at the end, that complaint fell by the wayside. 🙃
This book tells the story of a young women in Japan who seeks out easy, non-stressful jobs. The book describes the five jobs she lands.
• Job 1: Surveilling a person (he is a writer) in his apartment who was slipped some contraband in a DVD container unbeknownst to him, and authorities have bugged his apartment with a camera, so they can determine when someone is going to pick it up, so they can nab the person. The protagonist has the mind-numbing job of watching his every movement (or lack thereof) in two rooms of his apartment.
• Job 2: Writing copy for businesses that wanted to advertise on a circulating bus (a bus that traveled a certain route within the city)
• Job 3: Working for a cracker company in which she is tasked to write interesting facts on the wrapper of crackers “that will interest both 10-years-olds and their 90-year-old grandmothers”. It’s funny…when she is told this she tries to figure out the likelihood that a 90-year-old grandma would have a 10-year-old grandkid…not very likely!!!
• 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.
• Job 5: Works for a national park/forest, and her job is to sit in a hut on the outskirts of the park and pick up people who get lost in the park.
I know I am not being terribly descriptive above, but these jobs are not very interesting which is part of the appeal to her for these jobs. It appears she just wants to get by in life. A love interest is not mentioned once in the novel. She lives at home with her parents, but her mother makes only brief appearances in the novel. I like the character — she does not come across as a jerk, she appears to be well-adjusted, and (view spoiler) .
So, why I liked the book was in part Tsumara’s writing style and she occasionally made me smile or laugh with her protagonist thinking funny thoughts or making funny observations… Here are a couple:
• Mr. Hakota, Mr. Nojima and Miss Kudo were all good sorts, although my only contact with them was the ten seconds when I said good morning to them at the headquarters, so I couldn’t rule out the possibility that they were actually bad sorts just pretending to be good.
• In the end, though, I didn’t read the magazine on the train ride home. It had been a very busy day — in addition to three lost people, I’d also had to deal with a man who’d buried his wedding ring on impulse in the forest, then decided he wanted it back and asked me to search for it with him. Frankly, I was exhausted. When I told Mr. Hakota (her boss) about the ring man, he calmly informed me that they got quite a few such people. Unable to bring themselves to throw away or sell their rings, not even fully convinced they were ready to get rid of them, they would come to bury them in the forest.
Notes
• Kikuko Tsumara “experienced workplace harassment in her first job out of college, and quit after 10 months to retrain and find another position, an experience that inspired her to write stories about young writers.”
• 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)
• Very nice interview with the author: https://www.bigissuenorth.com/reading...
• Website for Polly Barton although it seems to have stopped at 2017 but it looks like there’s a bunch of Japanese short stories to read that she has translated: https://www.pollybarton.net/?fbclid=I...
Reviews (everybody liked it! 😊… ):
• https://www.npr.org/2021/03/25/980832...
• https://samstillreading.wordpress.com...
• https://thenerddaily.com/review-there...
• https://booksandbao.com/review-theres...
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Reading Progress
May 21, 2021
–
Started Reading
May 22, 2021
– Shelved
May 22, 2021
–
Finished Reading
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You are quite welcome. I have a suspicion the book will be available.
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