Book: There’s no such thing as an easy job

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There is no such thing as an easy job
Kikuko Tsumura, Polly Barton (Translator)
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"[A] 21st-century response to Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener.'"―NPR

"A revelation."―Time

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and ideally, very little thinking.

Her first gig--watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods--turns out to be inconvenient. (When can she go to the bathroom?) Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job--writing trivia for rice cracker packages; punching entry tickets to a purportedly haunted public park--it becomes increasingly apparent that she’s not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful. And when she finally discovers an alternative to the daily grind, it comes with a price.

This is the first time Kikuko Tsumura--winner of Japan's most prestigious literary award--has been translated into English. There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is as witty as it is unsettling--a jolting look at the maladies of late capitalist life through the unique and fascinating lens of modern Japanese culture.


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This took… forever to finish. (I did not put a start date… but it was late August 2023… and I kept my Kindle offline to keep the loan hahahahaha)

I’m not sure if at first I was not paying attention or what, but I got the impression that the main character was a male. But eventually by the time of the… 3rd job? I figured out it was a female.

The first job (surveillance) gave me a wrong footing and I thought this was a book set in some alternate universe (think 1984 or such). I felt the ups and downs of seeing the promotional ads but apparently those were expired promotional ads so the promotion had ended (how many times did I see a Facebook ad and when I contacted the store then they said it’s not available anymore?)

As she went through jobs, and she explained of her burnout, I sort of got an inkling that she used to work in a people-interaction-heavy job, so by the end of the book, I wasn’t at all surprised. She does have an affinity to communicating with people, so it was only natural that she originally worked in that field.

There were a couple of notable ways of thinking but overall the book just dragged… on……. (Especially on her… 4th job?)