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. 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.
In a world plagued with jobs that demand more and more of their workers without appropriate compensation, it is no wonder that so many people burn out, which is exactly what happens to Kikuko Tsumura's unnamed protagonist in her new novel, There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job. This woman in her 30s is done with the hard work and wants something easy ... and that's specifically what she asks for at her employment agency - an easy job. But she is soon to find out that there is no such thing as an easy job, as the title of this novel implies.
There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job follows the protagonist through her work at five different jobs - one in surveillance, where she watches a man on camera hoping to catch a glimpse of contraband supposedly in his possession; one in bus advertisements, where she writes copy for ads played on the bus line; one in cracker packet advertising, where she comes up with a novel idea for the back of a cracker packet; one in poster promotion, where she puts up posters in the homes of people and businesses; and one at a national park, where she performs park maintenance.
This book is solely focused on the narrator's work, so that is the only aspect of her life that we see. While I am a fan of career-focused novels, this one falls short, frankly because none of the protagonist's jobs are particularly interesting. I can see where the author tried to inject some "spark" into these easy, boring jobs, and while her ideas may do well in Japan, where this book is set, I don't know how well they will go over with an American audience.
If you can accept that a book about easy jobs will, in nature, not be the most exciting read, there is a lot to enjoy on these pages. Readers are given a healthy dose of Japanese life and culture, and will enjoy drawing parallels between working conditions in Japan as opposed to those in the United States.
Availability: Book Rating: *** Stars Reviewer: Brooke, Public Relations Librarian
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GENRE: Literary Fiction; Translations
THEME: Unnamed Narrator
WRITING STYLE: Witty
TONE: Amusing; Hopeful
LOCATION: Japan
SUBJECT: Burn Out; Capitalism; City Life; Job Hunting; Job Satisfaction; Purpose in Life; Temporary Employees; Work; Young Women
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