Comparing this novel to the work of Ottessa Moshfegh or Sayaka Murata seems somewhat misleading, if a bit lazy. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job has elements that may bring to mind certain aspects of Convenience Store Woman but it has almost nothing in common with My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Still, I could have enjoyed Kikuko Tsumura's novel if it had something interesting to say or if it was written in a particularly inventive or catchy way. Sadly, I found There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job to be an exceedingly boring story that is written in an exceedingly boring way. Some of the issues I had may be due the translation (more on that later) but for the most part Tsumura's prose is kind of dull. Her protagonist, the classic unnamed narrator, lacks the deadpan tone of Murata's mc, nor does she have the same upbeat voice as the lead in Temporary (a novel that explores modern workplace in an absurdist fashion).
Tsumura's book is divided in five sections, each one focusing on a different job: in the first one our mc works a surveillance job (this happened to be the only section I enjoyed), in the second one she records ads for a bus company (advertising the shops that are on the route of that bus), in the third one she has to come up with 'fun/useful facts' for a packet of crackers, in the third one she puts posters up, and in the final job she works at a park maintenance office. We never gain any real insight into her private life (I'm fairly sure she lives alone and her parents are still alive) and we never learn anything about her past (other than she left her job because of burnout syndrome).
The jobs she are peculiar and yet they never held my interest. I liked Temporary much more because the jobs the mc does there are really weird. Yet, I think I could have tolerated reading about a relatively ordinary workplace if the dialogues or mc's inner monologue had been amusing, as they are in Murata's novel (which managed to make tedious tasks entertaining).
Even if I where to judge Tsumura's novel without drawing comparison to other novels, I still can't think of anything positive to say about it. The narration lacked zest, oomph. She recounts her routine in a very prosaic way, and she offers no real insights into why 'modern' work culture makes her feel so uninspired.
Usually when I read a translated book I don't really notice that the prose was not originally written in the language I'm reading but here the writing had this stilted quality that made me kind of aware that I was indeed reading a translation. Certain word choices struck me as awkward. There are many instances in which the narrator's colloquial style is interrupted by high-register and or antiquated words (such as nigh!). Maybe this was simply reflecting the original Japanese but I can't say for sure as I'm afraid my knowledge of Japanese is abysmal. And yes, I understand that translation is not an easy chore (in the past I tried my hand at translating) but that doesn't change that the prose There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job offers some eyebrow-raising phrases/passages.

Usually I read books of this length in two or three days but it took me five days to finish this novel (and I nearly fell asleep while reading it...which is new for me).

thanks to the narrator's voice in 'there's no such thing as an easy job', this book is incredibly funny, in a dry, unintentional way. while i haven't read as many translated works as i would like, i love how much kikuko tsumura leans in to our main character's deadpan attitude towards life and work, after being in those environments for so many years.

this book goes from being about a woman who has completely lost all interest in a complicated working life, wishing for something simple and easy to tide her over just so she has some money after leaving her previous job due to burnout. there's a frankness to the way kikuko tsumura explores the working world and just burnout in and of itself, how it feels to be sick of the working world and how dishonest it is in how it advertises your role. it's comically dark without ever feeling cynical: it's honest, and true to so many people's experiences in the world.

i did find, however, that this book suffers from being entirely too long. i understand the repetition, the monotony, is what makes the main themes of the narrative clear, but the initial 250 pages are a lot to get through. once the narrator's attitude changes become clearer, and the jobs somehow get even stranger, i found myself unable to put this book down. i definitely think it was a purposeful stylistic choice, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it was incredibly slow going at first.

For fans of Convenience Store Woman, this is a lovely slice-of-life story that asks big questions underneath. While on the surface, it seems to be about a woman who can't hold down a job, it's really about connection, caring, and the threads that tie us to society. Charming, funny and surprisingly deep, I really enjoyed this. I also thought that the translation was fantastic, treading a light path between preserving the elements of Japanese culture that might be surprising to a UK reader while making the narration accessible, voice-driven and funny.

I've been reading a lot of contemporary Japanese fiction and was looking forward to reading this story of a young woman searching out 'easy jobs' after burnout as a social worker. For me it was a mixed experience. There were parts of the novel that were very amusing, and parts that were very sad, I did like the magical realism parts.

However overall I found it too long, it could have benefited from more editing and I don't think it's of the calibre of Convenience Store Woman with which it's compared.

As always with books that are deemed “amusing,” I often find myself thinking just how tragic it is. I enjoyed reading it for the most part, but the book has some lengths for me. I can sort of see the parts that some would find amusing, but I don’t know why but this book just overall made me profoundly sad for the people in it and the world in general. Probably me.

This was such a lovely book.
The protagonist is a 36-year old woman, who keeps hopping from job to job after a burn out.
I loved the magical realism elements of the book, and it being in a non de-script place in Japan.
I recognize a lot of her searching for an ideal balance of challenge, interaction and peace of mind.

I read the translation in English, which I think captured the book well, but had a bunch of grammar and spelling mistakes, which was unfortunate.

The book was given to me by NetGalley.

I really wanted to love this one. It had many elements I would usually like: a young, female protagonist, set in Japan, focused discussion on working environments. Heck, it’s even being compared to two of my favourite novels (Convenience Store Woman and My Year of Rest and Relaxation).

In my opinion the comparison only works against it, setting it up to fail.

TNSTAAEJ has none of the clever social commentary that is so special about those other two novels. Were it shorter, maybe half the size, it could have been an enjoyable and interesting (maybe even relatable as I’ve experienced burnout myself) read but it was so long and monotonous it just became a chore to read.

I had high hopes and I’m so disappointed.

There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Japanese author Kikuko Tsumura is funny at times, deep at others. An excellent read about passion and finding meaning.

After a burnout all the narrator wants is a job without substance, a job that is close to home. She lands a surveillance job across the street and soon the one being watched seems more alive than the watcher. Every day the things the narrator does and eats resemble the life of the novelist she is watching more. What does this say about being worried that other people are paying more attention to you than to their own lives?

Her surveillance job is only part of the story in There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, but it already feels complete with well-rounded characters and its own subplot. The main character is a very observant narrator. Unfortunately for her, her active mind can’t seem to take a break as she tries her best at this job and her next jobs: the cracker packet job, the bus advertising job, the postering job and the easy job in the hut in the big forest (where they cut holes in the fence to help people escape).

Coincidences happen at every job when people and companies respond to her work. Appearing and disappearing play a major role in the jobs she does, adding some mystery to the stories. At every job, she encounters something or someone that, like her, appears and disappears. While her colleagues are all set in their jobs, like she was for fourteen years, she is the exact opposite. Now she has even escaped our surveillance and gets to live her life without us watching her every move.

I really enjoyed this book because of the narrative tone. Burnout can be a heavy theme but the main character’s approach to life is not negative. The people she encounters are passionate about what they do. While the jobs don’t seem important, the people make a difference. I’m taken in by their enthusiasm too, reading with a smile on my face.

You can read this book as a light book and enjoy reading about the odd jobs she does which is perfectly fine. But if you take some time to think about her thoughts, then you’ll notice the deeper layer almost obscured by the light and ‘funny’ way Kikuko Tsumura describes the jobs.

There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is foremost about believing in yourself, picking yourself up after a burnout, and finding meaning. Even though the people around you say you’re doing a good job and are content with what you do, that won’t matter if you don’t believe it yourself. If you can’t feel your own usefulness, any hurdle that comes up can be an excuse to run away. To draw a parallel with the bus advertising job: when no one can hear your ad, it is like you don’t exist. And when you do nothing, your contract and job might as well cease to exist.

There's a certain quirky charm about this book where the narrator is burnt out from her job as a social worker and so takes a series of what are supposed to be easy temp positions. But it's far more conventional than 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' with which it's being compared and doesn't have anything like the profound and unsettling politicised millenial and counter-cultural malaise of Moshfegh.

Instead, we follow our young heroine till she realises that all jobs will lead you into unexpected encounters and challenging situations and that's the nature of (working) life. It's hardly startling as a philosophy and the book essentially comes full circle. There's a dry wit that makes this an amiable read but I'm realising that all these recent Japanese novels by female authors ('Breasts and Eggs', ''The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida') are not really my favourite reading.

This Book tells the story of 30ish woman who has had a burnout from her previous role and is now doing temp roles

I enjoyed reading this book and learning about the different culture esp as this book is set in Japan and I am based in the UK.

With thanks to Netgalley and &Bloomsbury Publishing for the

A light, fresh take on being burned it at work. The protagonist had left her previous job as it took too much emotional labor, and asks for an easy job. She is given almost comically easy jobs, watching surveillance footage of an author, sticking up posters and manning a hut in the middle of a national park among others, but each job turns out to have hidden depths. I found the main character amusing, if hard to empathize with, as she gets fed up with each of the jobs, but she finds out a bit more about herself with each one, and ends up helping others. She finally ends up going back refreshed to her original line of work. I enjoyed this slightly exaggerated slice of Japanese millennial life. It was lighter than convenience store woman, but just as enjoyable.

Brilliant take on the absurdity of daily working life / modern surveillance from a really fresh, dry new voice. Reminded me of Sakaya Murata and Nicole Flattery. Excellent style and an equally good translation. Full of quirky comments and witty turns of phrase. However, it took a while for the story to pick up and though the voice makes it enjoyable it felt like a bit of a slog, especially with the formatting issues (see below). A part of me wished there was a clearer direction, I suppose more of a narrative push, to give it an extra layer of substance/intrigue.

A note on the proof -- for some reason theres a malfunction in the formatting so symbols like --+0 --1+ appear on every other page, sometimes in the middle of sentences. For a while I thought this was some experimental thing going on in the text! It would be good to get it sorted as it can be distracting.

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.

This feels like a thoroughly modern novel, a fresh look at ideals of workplaces and fulfilment and looking for meaning as a young woman without direction. It is translated from Japanese and set in Japan, but a lot of the issues are universal, as she needs to find appropriate times to be in if she wants to get deliveries and deals with weird workplace politics. The book also has a fantastical sense, with the absurdity of some of the jobs and the weird circumstances bringing a kind of dark comedy to burnout and to modern ideas of what you should want from a job. It is amusing and clever, and easy to enjoy the eccentric characters, but also feel for the narrator, especially as the book draws to a close.

I don't really want to say this is a very millennial book that captures a moment of people being consumed by work in different ways, but it's hard not to want to write that. It has a kind of darkly comic existentialism about looking for meaning, even when the narrator is mostly looking for maté tea.

This was a charming novel about a woman in her mid-thirties who, after a burn out at her previous job, decides to sign up with a temp agency and work various short term jobs. She wants something easy, with very little reading and writing, and no need to think too much. She ends up working in surveillance, writing advertisment for a local bus route, writing fun facts for the back of rice crackers packets, walking around to change awareness posters around a few blocks, and working in a park - mapping out some sections and keeping an eye on lost visitors.
Each job comes with surprises - some nearly magical (the bus advertising job where local shops appear and disappear out of the blue!), and little by little the main character seems to get more confident.
It was heart-warming and lovely but I kept hoping it'd go further, be more critical of work in general, or working conditions, or go deeper into the reasons a young woman ends up working temp jobs because work had become so unbearable, or why another character ended up giving up work altogether; but it didn't. It kind of stayed on the surface of things for most of the book, despite good opportunities to be more critical.
I loved it still, but more as a quirky novel than a commentary on work.

Set in Japan, out burnt out narrator finds herself at the job centre enquiring about jobs that require as little effort as possible. To start off with you have no idea of her previous work, but she is a woman in her thirties and she has had enough of her last job. There are no clues given as to what that job was but it sounds like it was incredibly stressful and for now she just want an easy life with no hassle.

The job centre comes up trumps and over the course of the year she finds herself working in five different jobs each totally different from the next, each job is a temporary contract and she throws herself in to each one, giving the extra mile and now that I have read the book to the end I can see the subtle hints about her old job which is not revealed until the end.

The jobs themselves are quirky, Her first is a surveillance job where she watches a writer day after day, noting down anything unusual. Her second is writing advertisements for a bus route to promote local businesses. The third job is writing facts that will be printed on to cracker packets. The fourth is walking round changing over posters that advertise road safety and planting trees. The fifth has to be my favourite, she finds herself working in a massive park in a lonely hut mapping out a section of the forest, exploring the area for edible treats such as breadfruit and persimmons.

Each job is not a simple as she thinks and each job has something that needs her helping hand and as the book progresses you see how good the narrator is at problem solving, she is dogged in her determination to make things right.

This is a charming book, it is full of supporting characters at each job who have their own quirks and it is also full of wonderfully described food, even things I probably would avoid sound delicious! I think this book shows that sometimes it is ok to leave the rat race and step back, it’ll still be there but for the sake of self-care and sanity, taking a different path is the best.

I wanted to like this book because I enjoyed the fact that it was a window into a culture completely different to my own. However, I struggled to connect to the main character so the last half of the book was a slog.