There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura. Pub 2015. Translation by Polly Barton. Pub 2020.
When I first got this one (as part of a set of books won in a raffle earlier this year), I thought it was a non-fiction book, a guide to job hunting in the realities of a complicated world. It is not really that, but it is a good fable about the difficulties of finding utterly easy, disconnected, or non-impactful work. I decided to give this a read after thoroughly enjoying Before the Coffee Gets Cold earlier this year, with its delightful little ghost/time-travel story.
The narrator of the story has recently left a job due to burnout. She doesn’t say what the job was, just that the environment and the work were terribly hard on her, such that she is now seeking a job with as few demands as possible – an easy job. Through the employment agency, she embarks on a series of five jobs over the course of several months – surveillance, bus advertisements, cracker wrappers, posting posters, and map-making in a local forest. In each job, it starts out as exactly what she wants – an easy job with no attachment, no opportunity to progress, no work to take home. But in each, despite her original intentions, she finds that connections and engagements emerge. Whether unconsciously or with some supernatural help, she finds herself pursuing ways to make contributions, and each job develops into more than the easy work she was seeking. Along the way are some small-world coincidences, happy accidents, and fairly daring escapades, all of which bring her through to a sense of closure and recovery. By the end of the year, amidst some other coincidences that seem to point this way, she is ready to take on more, including possibly returning to her previous role (as a social worker).
As with the Coffee book, Easy Job has a fable-like quality, where there’s always a hint of something supernatural going on – not a lot, but just enough to make the settings and situations appear somewhat unreal and lend an air of mystery to the story. Perhaps that is just my own unfamiliarity with the ways of a Japanese setting. Regardless, this quality makes the novel very enjoyable. It is a fable about trying to be something you are not, and how running away from something is rarely a solution. In describing her search for an easy job, the narrator thinks, “…I felt that a hole had opened up in my heart. If being busy would prevent me from having to look at that hole, I could probably handle any kind of job.” By the end of the story, she has had sufficient time, space, and experience to realize that the title is true: there is no such thing.
Fate: I have someone in mind to pass this along to.
8 – female author
13 – set somewhere I’ve never been
21 – translated from Japanese
25 – a new author to me
37 – non-mainstream
rclr 