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

A burnt out social worker goes on a quest to find peaceful employment.

The 36-year-old unnamed narrator of There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job has quit her social worker job of 14 years and embarked on a new career. Or rather, she's trying to discover if a new career is even a possibility. Her recruiter, Mrs Masakado, is given the task of finding something that is not too demanding, something easy on the nerves. 

What follows is essentially a description of five jobs trialled over the period of a year. There is surveillance work done in an office in front of a computer, with hours watching an unsuspecting male subject via hidden camera; next is a job writing advertising copy for a local bus company; then a humorous, off-beat stint writing trivia questions and answers for the back of a popular commercial cracker biscuit; a job putting up local posters, one that involves some petty politics and aggression from a rival organisation; and finally, a dreamy job working in a park doing pretty much nothing, but one that comes with its own strange and mysterious events.

The style of the book is quite bland and flat, yet strangely addictive, with a dry humour shot throughout. Kikuko Tsumura describes the minutiae of everyday life and the small scale politics of human interactions. Through this attention to detail, the narrator even surprises herself at how little she knows of her own world, even her own desires. Studying the man in her surveillance job from the comfort of a desk, she starts to live vicariously through him, developing an appetite for whatever he is eating. When taking the local bus she now writes advertisements for, she starts to study more closely the route, only to discover, quite to her shock, new shops and restaurants she never knew existed.

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is unconventional to be sure. There's no real story arc, no major characters on which the action really pivots, just the narrator passing through five jobs. Yet there's something very human and sympathetic about Kikuko Tsumura's writing. Her gentle negotiating of the world of work and the different personalities that we bump up against make for an astute portrait of contemporary life. A clever contrast here is made in the last chapter with one of our original hunter gatherer forbears, the Obayashi hominin, a fossil of which was found at the park the narrator works at. It is discovered that a man has been living wild in the park, living off fruit and nut trees, trying to escape his middle-class life. Can we transition from burn out to the possibility of oneness with nature and the world? seems to be one of the novel's many existential questions.

A mind bending trip through the mind numbing world of modern work.

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura. Published by Bloomsbury. $29.99

Review by Chris Saliba

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