There's No Such Thing As An Easy Job

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.

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.

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 related to this novel far too much for comfort. Hilarious and terrifying in equal measure, it'll be hard to go back to your normal life when you've finished. But it's worth it.