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Published Mar 2021
416 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Convenience Store Woman meets The New Me in this strange, compelling, darkly funny tale of one woman's search for meaning in the modern workplace.
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.
"Tsumura's droll wit is so subtle it's almost imperceptible. It's the kind that challenges the reader to pay close attention to the nuances at work beneath the narrative...it has a strange, almost calming effect...somehow it leaves you feeling weirdly optimistic. One thing's for certain: You won't have to work to enjoy this book." - Kirkus Reviews
"Tsumura's sharp English-language debut follows a woman's search for fulfillment in an all-consuming late-capitalist Japan...Tsumura's rendering of a millennial besieged by anxious overthinking and coping through deadpan humor and sarcasm rings true. As the monotonous and fantastic collide, Tsumura shows that meaning and real intrigue can be found in the unlikeliest of places." - Publishers Weekly
"A delightfully strange tale of one young woman's search for meaningful work." - The Bookseller, Editor's Choice
"A wise, comical and exceptionally relatable novel on finding meaning and purpose in our work lives." - Zeba Talkhani, author of My Past Is a Foreign Country
"Quietly hilarious and deeply attuned to the uncanny rhythms and deadpan absurdity of the daily grind, Kikuko Tsumura's postmodern existential workplace saga both skewers and celebrates our deeply human need to function in society and keep surviving in an oftentimes senseless-seeming world." - Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti
This information about There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kikuko Tsumura is a writer from Osaka, Japan. She is the winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and numerous Japanese literary awards including the Akutagawa Prize, Noma Literary Prize, Dazai Osamu Prize, and a New Artist award.
Polly Barton is a translator based in Bristol. Winner of the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs's International Translation Competition, she has received the Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize and the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize.
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