A woman, burnt out from her career, leaves and begins a search for a job that is close to home, with minimal responsibility or effort required. She is sent to several temporary assignments where she tries to work out exactly what she is looking for.

I’m not sure what attracted me to this book initially. It was a change to what I’d been reading generally in 2020, when I hadn’t really strayed from crime thrillers and romance as a means of escapism. So this was a breath of fresh air and I thoroughly enjoyed it!

The writing is wonderful, translated from the original Japanese. The main character is sympathetic. I think in this busy world, there are very few people who haven’t experienced some sort of work related stress or burnout so to see her trying to make sense of her life after this was relatable. Exactly what happened to her in her earlier career is only vaguely touched on, though is fleshed it a little more as we get to know her.

The book feels like it is set in our world but slightly off kilter; there is an undercurrent of weirdness through several of her assignments.

This book definitely stands out from my recent reads and I hope her future works are also translated for the English speaking market.

Unfortunately I couldn't really get past the writing style of this, and I don't know if that's down to translation or if it's just a bit too dry for my taste. There's No Such Thing As A Easy Job is, in reality, just a list of jobs performed by a rather dull woman. A woman we learn nothing about, and therefore have no emotional attachment to.

I just feel that there was something missing here. I wanted a bit more from the narrator, more from her jobs, and more absurd events. There's hints of things that seem a little odd scattered about that started to draw my interest, before we quickly move on. I get what the author was trying to do here, by saying that we as individuals create the life we want and we can enjoy anything if we put our minds to it. I just struggled to really understand what as the point.

I really enjoy reading Japanese translated fiction and this did not disspaoint.
I found this book very plain and uneventful, however I could not put it down and was sucked into this slice of life wanting to know more.
A very enjoyable book!
Thanks to Netgalley for allowing me to read a ARC of this book in return for an honest review.

This book features a woman in her thirties struggling with burnout from her career. She throws herself into many different "easy" jobs to try recover. But, is there such thing as an easy job?

Some dodgy formatting toppled with an average plot made this a painful read.

While there’s nothing wrong with this novel I feel the marketing has really done it a disservice.

The books that There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job is compared to are Convenience Store Woman and My Year Of Rest And Relaxation. Both of those novels are about unusual characters largely doing very mundane things, and it is the unusualness of the characters that draws in our interest.

TNSTAAEJ gives us nothing about the protagonists inner life, it’s just a list of mundane actions with no real commentary provided by the character. The comparisons with the other books just highlight that TNSTAAEJ isn’t held together by a strong-willed protagonist who is at odds with the world around her.

I also felt like the jobs themselves weren’t that odd? As someone who has previously done temp work there are a lot of odd temp roles out there and these seemed relatively normal. So if the book was supposed to be an insight into the world of office jobs that aren’t related to a traditional profession then that didn’t come through for me either.

Side note: I seem to read a lot of novels at the moment that have writers in them and I just don’t get it? Writers are boring, it’s their stories that are interesting.

*Did not finish* abandoned at 25%.

<i>There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job</i> is a quirky novel following a woman who have to burnout from her original job finds herself at an employement agency requesting a job with very little thinking. She moves through a series of strange and mundane jobs such as writing bus adverts for shops that disappear, writing advice on crackers and trying to convince people to stick up posters in their house.

The jobs are largely mundane, but the narrator l, the main protagonist slowly over the course of each job becomes deeply invested and often gives over a lot of her energies to the jobs. Each of the jobs she becomes involved with have oddities and unusual happenings such as strange rival poster companies trying to steal people's money, shops disappearing in line with lost adverts. It makes the novel a little unusual and adds some intrigue to the mundanity of the jobs.

The novel itself was quite quirky and I devoured the first 40% quite quickly. However, then I set it down for about 2 months and couldn't find much enthusiasm to continue. When I did pick it back up, I didn't really enjoy the ending of the novel as much and felt that it was getting too repetitive and long in style by the end.

I think ultimately for me, whilst elements of the social commentary on work culture stood out and I enjoyed some of its quirky oddities. The overall execution fell a little flat for me by the end and I'm not sure this will be the most memorable of reads. However, I know others have absolutely loved this book so I think it very much depends on the individual reading it.

Thanks to netgalley and bloomsbury for the review copy.

Thank you Netgalley for sending me this copy. The format was a little confusing in places, possibly due to the translation.
This story follows a woman who leaves her job of 14 years due to burnout and is on the search for an “easy job” ... she tries out many short term roles and meets many new people. But is there such a thing as an easy job?!

I went in having only read the quick summary on NetGalley, which I tend to do often and I am usually pleasantly surprised.

I enjoyed Kikuko's novel which is based on a woman who quits her job due to burnout and in a year or so experiences 4 different fixed term contracts at completely different jobs. The reader is not told what the original job was or a lot about the protagonist but there's still the sense of knowing this person and experiencing unusual jobs through her.

The translation flowed well and the translator put their spin on the text as some of the expressions are very English.

Overall I would recommend this book, it's very appropriate for now.

Having briefly skimmed reviews for There's No Such Thing As An Easy Job, they are incredibly mixed. And having read it, I can see why. To me, it was... fine. But I can understand why some people loved it, just as I can understand why some people hated it.

The biggest issue for me was that it felt like a book of four (long) short stories, rather than one piece of continuous writing. And as I'm rarely a big fan of short stories and tend to find collections of them frustrating to read, this probably explains my indifference towards the book.

There's an element of mundane surreality throughout this book – with slightly odd occurrences happening in each of the four jobs that the narrator takes on over the course of the year, but the agonising aspect for me was the total lack of answers. And for some people that's probably a source of great entertainment, but I'd rather have my mysteries solved.

What was relatable was the narrator being a millennial who dives in head-first with huge enthusiasm to new tasks, only to become bored or burnt out with them fairly quickly. The conclusion of what this means felt a little unsatisfying, and was extremely brief compared to the length of the book.

This wasn't really the book for me, however I didn't dislike it at all! I just never managed to quite connect with it.

It was not my cup of tea, but I can understand what some people might enjoy about it. I found it too mundane and was jot interested and did not look forward to reading it...finishing it was a struggle!

A young woman explorers a number of seemingly straightforward but ever so slightly weird jobs... where does someone find an employment agency like this?!

Truly charming and relatable, This has that delicate yet impactful touch that a lot of Japanese literature seems to have. A great read for fans of Convenience Store Woman. This is a warm, funny book with a lot of threads and more to it than you first think

Sometimes a book just finds you at the right time, and this was one of those for me.

There's No Such Time As An Easy Job follows a women in her 30s through five different new jobs after she leaves her long-term job because she burnt out. As she meanders through an array of wacky jobs (everything from surveillance to fun fact writer on rice packets), she grows as an individual and comes to the conclusion that the hard bits are part of living.

It's one of the most relatable books I've read in a while, and really made me reflect on my own work-life balance - especially in a pandemic. She's also really funny, and I often found myself giggling in between the darker parts of the books. All in all, a really enjoyable and meaningful read.

“At times...I would be seized by the certain knowledge that I was a total and utter idiot and descend into bouts of self-loathing, cursing myself for stealing the company’s money in the guise of undeserved wages.”

“There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job” chronicles a year in the life of a burnt-out Japanese woman who resigns from her high-pressure career to take a series of short-term, mundane, meaningless jobs. I was expecting a more explicit critique of capitalism and Japanese work culture, but for the most part this was a pretty plodding episodic novel which merely gestured vaguely at a moral lesson right at the end, in a fairly shallow and unsurprising way.

As someone who works in advertising I found it pretty devastating damning soul-destroying jokes that 3 of the protagonist’s 4 meaningless jobs were in some way linked to marketing/communications, and there were elements of the novel which I found relatable: the imposter syndrome and frantic worry over the tiniest of mistakes; the way any job, even the most unassuming, can take over your mental space/life if you give it the room to do so. But overall I felt that the boredom of the protagonist’s jobs suffused the book as a whole, and struggled to care much about it at all. Maybe that ennui was deliberate, an attempt to put the reader in the shoes of the protagonist. But if so, the book is an unfortunate victim of its own success.

This is a hard book to categorise, while feeling very real it also had some magical/supernatural elements to it. I loved the idea of mindless jobs can be what you need to rest when your career stresses you out. It reminded me a lot of some of the recent films such as Your Name & Weathering With You.

The premise of this book spoke to me - a woman in her 30's has burnt out from her career and so tasks her recruitment officer to find her a job with minimal expectations, responsibilities or...well, work. Man, did I feel that - ten years in the public sector will do that to a person. But beyond that, I didn't know what to expect from this book. What I found was a real gem.

Told in five sections, each covering our unnamed narrator's experience of a different job, I found this book really compelling. The jobs themselves are odd - viewing surveillance tapes, recording adverts to play on a local bus route, creating trivia for cracker wrappers, putting up posters, and perforating tickets in a isolated cabin in a public park - and often have elements that verge on the surreal. And as we join our narrator in turning up to them every day, many interesting points about work come up. I had expected this to be a cynical look at the way modern work is structured and the toll it can take on a person both physically and mentally. But instead, the message here seems to be that no matter how absurd the task, no matter the quirks of co-workers, no matter how pointless a job can seem, we can and should draw meaning and purpose from what we do. Be it connecting with others, helping others, offering service or simply just having something to do all day, work can offer us more than just a pay packet.

Whether due to how it's written or how it's been translated, this book is spare in terms of prose style. But I think it really worked, I felt the voice of the narrator sounded really authentic whilst also having a tone I recognise from other Japanese authors. There are equal parts humour and insight in this, which is always a winning formula for me, and I felt carried along by the story. Overall, there was a sweetness to this book that I just really enjoyed.

I really enjoyed this book. It's a simple tale of a woman in her mid-thirties who has grown exhausted by her career. She tries lots of different "easy jobs" whilst she deals with her exhaustion. But with each of these jobs she throws herself into them so they actually all have their complications and moments of exhaustion. Because really there is no such thing as an easy job.

It is quite a simple story, an easy read without a lot of deep character development, but that doesnt mean I didnt enjoy it. It still poses questions and made me think, but in a nice relaxed way. So if you want a nice, gentle read in these uncertain times then read and enjoy this one.

This book is about a 30-ish woman in Japan, trying herself out in various jobs. The formatting was quite a bit off, so reading this book was a bit painful while being utterly enjoyable. I'm looking for the hardcover/paperback release, so I can dive again into the world of our unnamed narrator.

Our main character, a single woman in her 30s, drifts between increasingly surreal part-time jobs, looking for something she can do without becoming over-invested.

I adored this book. I identified so strongly with the main character that at times it hurt - and took me an unnecessarily long time to read! I love the mix of surface-level quirk and not-quite-magical-realism, day-to-day life in modern Japan, and the very real experience of a woman trying to find a healthy relationship with her work.

Highly recommended- I can’t wait to see what the author does next. And I hope it’s translated into English.

There's No Such Thing As An Easy Job is a novel about looking for meaning and escape in the modern world, as a young woman looks for the most suitable job for her. After burnout in her previous career, a woman asks an employment agency for an easy job: namely, one that involves no reading, little thinking, and is close to where she lives. She finds herself sitting for hours watching hidden camera footage of an author suspected of having contraband in his home, in a job that is opposite where she lives, but she gets drawn into the author's life and also into how she can manage her own life alongside watching his. The narrative follows her as she moves between suitable jobs found for her by the agency, ending up in absurd situations like writing bus ads for shops that seem to appear out of nowhere, but it doesn't seem like an easy job is so easy to find.

As someone who hasn't had a job before I still felt this on many levels. It brings up really interesting thoughts on work life balance and questions how we work in the 21st century.

Thank you netgalley for this early copy in exchange for a review.