There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (tr. Polly Barton)

Review by Jess Moody

‘”Is it a question of wanting a very uneventful job?”

“Yes, I think so. Ideally there would be events of some kind from time to time, but nothing too sudden.”

A woman surveilles a writer from her office cubicle; procrastination and internet shopping playing out in split-screen mirrors of real life. Local advertisements seem to announce business and buildings into existence. Cracker packets issue trivia, marriage advice, words of wisdom. Posters wage war. A hut in a forest hints at hauntings. This is one year of work and workplaces which may not be what it first appears.

Employment is the subject of Kikuko Tsumura’s debut-in-English novel. Each chapter is almost its own contained adventure, bullet after bullet on the CV of a job-hopping woman in her mid-thirties, seemingly looking for something easy: not too far to commute, little responsibility, a decent wage and health insurance a plus.

This focus on life through the lens of work – particularly for a woman – is delightful and disturbing in equal measure. Tsumura took up her writing on young workers following her own experiences of workplace harassment. The stories here are perhaps not so insidious, but rather focus on the aftermath of an abandoned career: a woman seeking change through choice, and the agency of a detached gaze. When she begins to find herself falling deeper into her roles – enthused, stressed, impacting on lives around her – the question of how and if she wishes to transform will be as unsettling as the places she works.

If you feel wary of spending several hundred pages watching a temp check in and check out, hold on to that sense of unease. The reader’s time is unapologetically in Tsumura’s hands. As circumspect and crafty as many of her protagonist’s co-workers, the author slowly, steadily replicates the rhythms of the 9-5: the supervisor’s instructions, the minutiae of repetitive tasks, and the gloriously disproportionate attention to lunch (“Sheesh….150 yen for a sweet bean jam and margarine roll.”)

Piqued curiosity keeps the forward momentum: the sense of something off-key, the jump of the needle in the groove. Oddity is embedded in the tasks asked of the narrator herself, or in the mannerisms of changing supervisors (“If you notice anything at all about her behaviour…”) As readers, we are all nervous newbies trying not to show our surprise as things get decidedly very weird indeed.

The narrator is a watcher. With some uncomfortable exceptions (bloc-voting factory workers; a social event with an ‘Anti-loneliness’ cult) the dialogue is mostly confined to small capsules of conversation: one on one, in cubicles, with shopkeepers, in golf carts, or half trapped in the office kitchen. Tsumura makes meaning through these rhythms, these compartmentalised interactions. The evolution of our narrator is understood through her changing reactions to reiteration, the choices made as to whether to carry on or make a change.

The novel is dominated by this careful internal monologue, which has mostly excised her out-of-work personality: hobbies, the parents she lives with but are rarely seen, no friends, no lovers. Time out of work – weekends, days off – are dismissed, unseen.

Protecting this focus without heavy-handedness requires care, particularly in translation. Here, as in Masudo Aoko’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, Polly Barton applies her exacting eye for the casual observation, the consciously flippant, the daily absurd (‘Do some bloody work, man’). She smoothly translates the language of the mundane from the Japanese to English: talk of ‘burn-out’, office hierarchy, small bento worlds of bought lunch, streaming shows and football fanaticism.

Comparisons have been made with Sayaka Murata’s prize-winning Convenience Store Woman: another woman’s search for workplace meaning in contemporary Japan. True, the two works share a tangible joy in careful observation, and an uncompromising narrator. Yet here, readers will find something of a more optimistic tone, a sprawling scope in stubborn sunlight.

Mesmeric, funny, wry, delightful – this is a novel to help the millennials find their own paths through the world they’ve inherited. That’s, well… it’s no easy job.

There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job Kikuko Tsumura is published by Bloomsbury, 26th November 2020