Happily, this novel by Kikuko Tsumura is an easy read. I’d picked it up for the Argo’s Japan Book Club and the sales copy succinctly lays out the premise:
A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and ideally, very little thinking.
The book tells the tale of five jobs, each weird, none well paying, though some coming with health insurance. The variety is key: none of the jobs outstayed their welcome for me and the book stuck the landing in drawing out to look at the protagonist's larger life and why she may have been seeking those easy jobs. On the whole a gentle read, not hugely incisive nor revolutionary but feeling true to life, albeit a heightened and sometimes magical version of it. That said, some passages still have bite:
‘It says here that you cited personal reasons as grounds for leaving.’
‘That’s right.’
I’d read on the internet that it was okay to cite ‘personal reasons’ for a whole host of circumstances. Even when submitting a full-blown resignation, the article informed, good old ‘personal reasons’ would see you through a majority of cases. Whether you’d had a boss who’d made barbed comments about you at a half-hourly rate, or you’d been blamed for the disappearance of a document mentioned on the job sheet that had never existed in the first place, or your colleagues had spread horrible rumors about you, or you’d been held responsible for ruining a business deal tat had fallen through after you’d refused to go drinking with some gyt at the client company – whatever your particular situation might be, ‘personal reasons’ was your man.
And yet, my ‘personal reasons’ didn’t seem to be landing too well with Mrs Masakado.
I’ll weakly recommend the book; it delivers on the concept and is a brisk read, which is certainly not guaranteed in a meditation on burnout. That said I was just as glad to have gotten it from the library, as I don’t think I’ll need to reread and don’t have anyone whose hands I think I’ll be pressing it into.
But why is there no such thing as an easy job? For that you’ll have to read past the spoiler cut.
Here are my answers. I reserve the right to come back and revise after book club.
1) We may come to realize we mistook a core aspect of the nature of the job.
2) Success and satisfaction at the job might be in large part shaped by a colleague.
3) If a job really works out, that might just make it desirable and competed for.
4) Even seemingly simple jobs may call on us to go above and beyond to counter those with ill intent.
5) A job that feels like our calling can take too much out of us.
I think part of why the ending landed so well for me was the respect without sugarcoating that Tsumura holds for labor in all its varied forms.
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