J-Lit Review #3: There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

A strange but enjoyable novel that always hints at the surreal or supernatural

This is the third in my ongoing series of reviews of Japanese literature in translation. I have previously reviewed Butter and The Bookshop Woman.

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There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is the first book I’ve read by Kikuko Tsumura. It’s not exactly a new book, having been released in 2020, but somehow it escaped me until recently when my girlfriend lent me her copy.

The novel tells the story of a thirty-six-year-old woman going through a series of jobs. Each job makes up one of the book’s five parts:

1.        The Surveillance Job

2.        The Bus Advertising Job

3.        The Cracker Packet Job

4.        The Postering Job

5.        The Easy Job in the Hunt in the Big Forest

The narrator once had a career but left her job due to burn-out syndrome, and after a period of claiming benefits she decides to re-enter the workforce. She is not entirely sure what she wants to do, but she wants it to be relatively easy (hence the book’s title). She struggles to articulate this to her recruiter, saying early on that she wants an “uneventful job” but one that had “events of some kind from time to time, but nothing too sudden.”

Ostensibly, the book is about her doing each of these five jobs but what makes it interesting is that each situation is slightly… well… strange. This is what I liked most about the book.

In one story, it seems that what the narrator does at her job appears to bring about big changes in the world in a supernatural sense. This is the bus advertising job, where she has to help write adverts that play over the P.A. system on the local bus network. She seems to write businesses into and out of existence.

I’ll say no more about that because I don’t want to spoil anything. However, it is never explicit that she witnesses anything entirely supernatural. All we get are hints of it and on balance it does seem more likely that she witnesses strange coincidences, albeit enough of them to make us question the reality of her world. In fact, in many cases the seemingly supernatural is explained away to some extent later, so perhaps we are meant to view this sort of split between the real and unreal as a condition of modern work and how it impacts our mental state.

That sounds rather like Haruki Murakami’s world, doesn’t it? That was the thesis behind my book, Murakamian Magical Realism and Psychological Trauma. However, in Murakami’s books, the unreal is usually obvious. Only in a handful of works, such as Norwegian Wood, is it implied or hidden.

My theory about this book is that the narrator’s experiences at each job reflect some aspect of modern working life in Japan. Indeed, according to what I’ve read online, Kikuko Tsumura had a bad experience at her first job and quit, inspiring her to write fiction about workplace challenges.

I think that the semi-supernatural qualities in this novel are meant to make us think more about problems that are perhaps merely accepted in the modern world. In the first story, for example, the narrator is hired to watch someone through hidden cameras, and she finds herself adopting his habits. Does this not speak for the extent to which people are influenced by what they see online? In the context of this book, it becomes absurd, pushing well beyond real-life instances. Later, we see her adverts apparently changing reality. Again, does this not speak for the pernicious influence of advertisement in the real world? There are many more examples, dealing with issues such as loneliness, stress, predatory behaviour, and obsession with sports.

Early in the book, her recruiter Ms. Masakado says, “I don’t recommend falling into a love-hate relationship with your work,” and perhaps the key thread running through all of these stories is that the narrator finds herself overly invested in each job, even though they are clearly quite trivial. The final one, in fact, is truly pointless. She is hired simply to occupy space.

Yet throughout this book, we see the narrator becoming overly invested. She takes pride in her work and gets involved in the lives of her co-workers. Sometimes she even seems to risk her own safety in comically ridiculous situations. We begin to see why maybe she became burned out in the first place. It seems to me that Tsumura is telling her readers, in an amusing but effective way: “It’s fine to care about your job, but don’t take it too seriously, especially if it’s just a meaningless temp job.”  

I mentioned it being “comical” and there is a gentle but almost surrealist humour running through the book. I felt it most strongly in the first story. When the narrator sees the man she is paid to observe eating sausages, she runs out to buy them but finds that the deal expired just a few hours earlier, so she briefly contemplates murdering someone. She does not take this idea seriously but it shows the absurdity again of our obsession with copying what we see people do on screens.

The plot may seem thin but we meet so many people and enter so many little stories that it is constantly entertaining. The narrator’s weird actions and the strange circumstances of each job sometimes seem to push into different genres (detective fiction, horror, etc.) and so even when little happens, there is the sense of something happening just off screen. The various characters who pop up show modern Japanese society in an interesting light. They are likeable but also oddly tragic. They are fundamentally good people but a little pathetic. They are almost all wildly overinvested in their jobs and lack real purpose.

Overall, I liked this book. The best word for it is just “strange.” Yet “strange” might make you think of Murakami’s most surreal works and this is very different. It is lightly strange. Slightly offbeat. I hope more of Tsumura’s work is translated into English in the coming years.

My one criticism here is that the translator (Polly Barton) has included a number of rather awkward British colloquialisms. These are not wrong but sound really bizarre in the context of the book. It’s hard to capture regional dialects and so forth through translation, but using mid-20th-century British expressions doesn’t really help, at least in my opinion.

If you’re looking for an easy read (about there not being an easy job), then consider this one. You can find it on Amazon as a printed or Kindle title. And if you’ve already read it, consider sharing your thoughts in the comments.