There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job, Kikuko Tsumura's first novel translated into English

Author Kikuko Tsumura. Photo / Supplied

With multiple lockdowns and the shift to many people working from home and workplaces becoming more flexible and adaptable over the past year, many people's attitudes to what pop philosopher Alain de Botton refers to as "the pleasures and sorrows of work" has shifted dramatically. Work is a four-lettered word, and workers are becoming increasingly aware of burnout and the quest for more meaningful work.

This is the first novel translated into English (by Polly Barton) from the Japanese by Osaka-based writer Kikuko Tsumura. It's been compared to acclaimed books My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata – and, like those novels, it will chime with anyone suffering late-capitalism fatigue, workplace burnout and employment precarity anxiety.

Our unnamed 36-year-old narrator walks into an employment agency and asks the recruitment officer Mrs Masakado to find her a job that requires no reading, no writing, and in particular, no thinking. Just an undemanding desk job, thanks, one which ideally involves something like "sitting all day in a chair overseeing the extraction of collagen."
We discover she has abruptly left her last job due to burnout but it isn't until towards the end of the novel that we find out exactly what that job was, which provides a grim sucker punch. Tsumura has said she experienced workplace harassment in her first job out of college, which has no doubt provided some inspiration for this novel.

As she drifts from one temp job to another, each role seems banal and cruisy enough on the surface but things become increasingly absurd. First up is a surveillance job, where she is required to watch tapes of a writer working from home who is suspected of stashing contraband goods. Then comes a role producing audio advertisements for a bus company and writing copy for businesses that advertise on a circulating bus.

Eerily, her adverts start disappearing, followed by the businesses themselves. She moves on to a position writing content for the backs of rice cracker wrappers. Her predecessor was a middle-aged man who is off work due to depression and it becomes clear that she isn't able to just "clock on and clock off", as it's impossible for her to detach and do "mindless" work – the training from her initial career is deeply ingrained.

Subtly distilling the minutiae of daily working life, this novel is offbeat and dyly funny with a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere. There's a strong sense here of clock-watching as time at work seems to stand still and, like Halle Butler's excellent blackly comic office novel The New Me, this archly explores the search for meaning in the modern workplace and the nuances of office dynamics. While it was written pre-pandemic, this novel couldn't be more timely.

Reviewed by Kiran Dass

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury, $33)