There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job

By Tsumara Kikuko

Translated by Polly Barton

2015, translated 2021

Bloomsbury Publishing

Tsumara Kikuko is a prolific and widely-known author in Japan who has written many novels about what it is like to live within Japan’s modern work culture. In There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, a nameless, 36 year old woman has just quit a job in social work. She had worked for 18 years and cited physical and psychological burnout as her cause for leaving. She decides to work as a haken shain, a dispatched worker. The narrator signs on in a temporary agency and meets with the kind Mrs. Masakado, who assists her in finding her a stress free job where she can work independently, free of office drama, in a quiet and uneventful environment. When we first encounter Tsumara’s protagonist, she is working as a surveillance agent. She spends her days observing two video screens, one featuring a live feed of a writer working from home, and the other a recording of the subject’s evening activities from the previous day. The police believe the writer is holding contraband and have contracted with a security firm to find evidence of his illegal activity. The narrator confesses that this job is a perfect fit for her personality, spending hours gleefully spying and taking notes on the life of a struggling non-fiction writer. Yet when the case concludes, she chooses to end her security posting–which she excels at–and requests that Mrs. Masakado finds her a job with less excitement. And so she does, providing the narrator with a series of occupations. She writes advertising copy for a moribund local bus route, produces curiosity-inducing text for a cracker company, canvases neighborhoods putting up posters, and works alone in an observation hut in a small forest. There are consistent elements in each of her occupations. Her manager is always a man who acknowledges that she will not be adequately compensated for her efforts, and nevertheless pressures her to devote herself to the work with all her heart. And despite her desire to avoid conflict and human contact, she discovers that she can’t help but fully immerse herself in each work environment. In job after job, she elevates the quality of the “project” and praise follows her wherever she goes. As much as the work Mrs. Masakado steers her toward seems absurd or insignificant, Tsumara’s heroine is forever girding her loins for the next challenge–even if the forces lurking behind the work seem malignant, conspiracy-laden, or even supernatural. There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is an interesting take on contemporary capitalism, the psychology of labor, and the degree to which we moderns have hitched our identity to the wagon of what we do.

“I wanted a job that was practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not. The sort of job where there was no chance of a genteel old lady with more time on her hands than she knew how to deal with showing up out of the blue and saying, ‘You look so tired!’ and ‘We’re counting on you!’ Above anything else, I wanted a job I could do alone. I knew that I’d need to leave that stipulation behind me at some point, but at least for the moment, that was how I felt.”