Barrelhouse Reviews: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura

Bloomsbury / March 2021 / 416 pages / Translated by Polly Barton

In There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, we meet an unnamed protagonist who has left her career of fourteen years due to psychological burnout syndrome. When the end of her unemployment insurance prompts a return to the workforce, she tasks pragmatic recruiter Mrs. Masakado with an unique request: find the protagonist the easiest possible job—one which requires no thinking. A proper quest begins with an end goal in mind, and “ideally something along the lines of sitting all day in a chair, overseeing the extraction of collagen for use in skincare products” is hers. 

Before opening the book I was expecting a collection of slightly dark, slightly comedic workplace nightmares full of vengeful coworkers and lecherous bosses. Instead, I found a compelling read with five very distinct settings spiced up with a varied cast of characters. The book opens with Tsumura’s protagonist working at the first of her five jobs: watching home surveillance footage of a struggling novelist who may have unwittingly concealed contraband in his home. Her task is to note his daily activities in the hope of finding something that isn’t quite right—a theme often repeated in this story. They sit opposite one another for hours, target and surveyor, at times perfectly mirrored in their deskbound drudgery. 

Next, she moves on to writing advertisements to be played on bus lines, then to a rice cracker company where she garners a huge following for her bits of advice on the individual cracker packets. Unfortunately, what were intended to be useful life tidbits, such as fixing your favorite broken plate or destinking a pair of shoes, mutates into the protagonist struggling to offer solutions for problems that go beyond the limited space on the cracker packet. “Since quitting his job my husband just sits around at home all day. I don’t know how much longer I can take living with him.” Bearing this daily emotional heft in the twisted name of wanting to offer genuine help whilst maintaining the boom in sales is in definite violation of her mindlessness criterion. 

In the beginning, she shows enthusiasm for her work, especially when it is validated by bosses or the public. But it’s too easy to assume we fully understand everything about Tsumura’s protagonist by the third job just because we recognize the pattern: the pressure she puts on herself, compounded by conflicting expectations from her employer. At times it was frustrating to watch her fall into the same traps of getting too involved in her work, especially when confronted by some truly bizarre situations. Nobody can conjure businesses from thin air! You’re going to burn out all over again!  I would yell at her. Yet Tsumura has more surprises in store for the reader. 

Things take an even more interesting turn when she decides to swap sitting behind a desk for something outdoors. “A job counting the number of sparrows sitting on telegraph cables, or the number of red cars passing through a crossing—I felt like if I listed those kinds of examples it would seem like I was joking, so I kept quiet, but in truth I was semi-serious. I wanted a job that was practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not.” Instead, she finds the exact opposite. The closer she comes to the end of her quest, the more trials are put in her way. There’s the job putting up public service posters which unwittingly draws her into contact with a cult that aggressively targets the lonely. Then in a forest in a hut—the last job—she confronts what could either be the ghost of a past humanoid or an extremely dexterous animal with a penchant for football gear. The reader can drop any remaining delusions that all the protagonist wants is a job involving collagen or counting birds. Mysteries may find her, but she charges into investigation without fear, climbing out of bathroom windows with paint cans and using magazine interviews as bait. It’s absolutely worth reading to the end to truly understand how she began this quest in the first place. That’s all I’ll say about the ending.

Easy Job’s punchy pacing combined with straightforward language makes it a quick but enjoyable read. Although free of fluff, Tsumura’s style includes occasional tendencies to overexplain a situation: “I couldn’t tell from his tone and expression whether he was trying to get rid of me, or whether he genuinely wasn’t bothered if I went or stayed. I guessed probably the latter: this wasn’t a particularly toxic working environment, and from his point of view, if I wasn’t going to be his subordinate anymore, it probably didn’t matter either way.” The book was originally published in Japanese, and I have encountered this trait in a lot of translated Japanese literature. It’s not enough to stagnate the reading experience by any means. 

There are also plenty of work culture quirks that many people can relate to. Some colleagues have genuine dedication to their job, while others just need the extra cash. The ladies in the rice cracker factory become the protagonist’s lunchtime buddies and provide honest opinions on the latest cracker packet trivia. Some of her bosses seem too far gone to bother with burnout, and then there is Mr. Hakota, the forest boss. His mild resentment towards the protagonist’s perceived pot-stirring is masked with overenthusiasm. “‘Don’t worry about it! You’re safe!’ he said, giving me a thumbs up. ‘What a relief, to have someone capable working for us for a change!’ What an odd interaction, I reflected. The words we were saying sounded so even-tempered, but I had felt a fierce tension running between us. It was clear to me: I had lost Mr. Hakota.”   

Somewhere along the way the quest is no longer strictly a quest. Instead, it’s a journey, and its challenges are what determine its conclusion. Tsumura’s protagonist knows that she is not a special case when it comes to burnout syndrome. In fact, some of her friends have remained in their jobs despite suffering the same symptoms. Although she is the only one in her circle of friends to walk away from her career, perhaps she’s not alone in thinking that a job on the opposing end of that lifestyle will fix everything. 

In the simplest analysis, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is a (fictional) collection of “tales of the workplace.” But it also delineates the journey of a person who has lost sight of what she truly wants from her career, someone who attempts to recapture what was lost. It’s a sentiment that many people in the workforce can relate to on some level. Whether you've achieved job satisfaction or dream of retiring to a hut in the middle of the forest, Tsumura will expand your notion of “work.”

Priya Singh is a freelance teacher and writer as well as being an MA student - a triple threat. She is currently editing her first novella, but you can find her most recent piece of short fiction in Five on the Fifth magazine. She lives in Germany with a growing pile of books and is determined to actually keep a plant alive someday.