There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job: Kikuko Tsumura

Product Information

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.”

In the end, there are no easy jobs for the narrator because her deepest desire is to do her best at what she loves—even if nothing changes about the unsustainable conditions that forced her to quit in the first place. She begins to see real change in the world because of the work she does. But then things go wrong, because workplaces are complicated. We can’t control our colleagues or even the work itself, and things change. 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)

About the contributors

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: The Osaka-born author quit her first job less than one year in after suffering workplace harassment; a depressingly commonplace occurrence the world over. Now she writes poignant stories full of heart, humour, and frustration angled towards modern work culture. Comparing this novel to the work of Ottessa Moshfegh or Sayaka Murata seems somewhat misleading, if a bit lazy. Quietly hilarious and deeply attuned to the uncanny rhythms and deadpan absurdity of the daily grind' - Sharlene Teo Kikuko Tsumura was born in Osaka, Japan, where she still lives today. In her first job out of college, Tsumura experienced workplace harassment and quit after ten months to retrain and find another position, an experience that inspired her to write stories about young workers. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards including 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. The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology recognized Tsumura's work with a New Artist award in 2016. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is her first novel to be translated into English.

Comparisons to Convenience Store Woman are perhaps inevitable, but mainly because this is a Japanese novel about a woman who rejects what's expected of her (career-wise, at least). Kikuko Tsumura's narrator and plot don't bear much resemblance to Sayaka Murata's. Another obvious reference is Temporary (same setup, much more surreal), but I was most reminded of meandering, oddly charming novels of modern life such as Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and The New Me.

I enjoyed all the stories/chapters, but the second, 'The Bus Advertising Job', was an easy favourite. It's filled with the kind of non-specific strangeness I adore in fiction (there's a suggestion that one of the narrator's coworkers has some sort of magical power, and I couldn't get enough of it). In general, I liked reading about the narrator's relationships with her colleagues – tenuous friendships, uneasy alliances, very true to the universal workplace experience. There are a lot of likeable people in this book; most of them are a little eccentric. I loved watching these characters go about their everyday lives and find moments of joy in the most unexpected things.

Job 2: Writing copy for businesses that wanted to advertise on a circulating bus (a bus that traveled a certain route within the city) Following our main protagonist as she discussed her own difficulties with burnout and the work force, and as she got job after job, it was so incredibly refreshing, eye opening, and helpful to see her thought process slowly changing, and how she came to feel about each job, and herself, in turn. Her first “easy job” is as a machine of the surveillance state. She monitors every moment of a half-baked novelist’s life, looking for evidence that he is unwittingly assisting a criminal enterprise by storing contraband in a DVD case. The surveillance firm could search his home, but they are overwhelmed by the size of his film collection. The job is transparently unnecessary.

Reviews

This enchantment stems in part from how curiously likable all of Tsumura’s characters are. To hold writing, especially writing by women, to a standard of likability can be dicey—but the popularization of disenchanted, bitter protagonists makes me wonder whether we now value too much the radicalism of unlikable characters.