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emmareads013's review against another edition
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
dangos's review against another edition
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
Really enjoyed this book. Superficially it seems banal and monotonous, but there is complexity underneath that felt very relatable. Satisfying ending.
pookiee's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
mysterious
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
all the jobs are weird yet mundane and super interesting to me! I’m struggling to figure out what I want in a career and this was calming.
some parts are left unfinished and idk why.
some parts are left unfinished and idk why.
gdobson's review against another edition
It was pleasant but nothing was happening. Reviews say there is no point to the story and it ends up saying nothing
jdscott50's review against another edition
funny
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
“Whoever you were, there was a chance that you would end up wanting to run away from a job that you once believed in, that you would stray from the path you were on. "
A young woman burned out from her job abruptly quits. Working with a temp agency, she wants a simple job like watching paint dry. She'll find that there is no such thing as an easy job.
Her first job is a surveillance job. She must watch a writer sit and do nothing until she discovers stolen rubies in a DVD Case. There is an interesting class difference here as she watched him seemingly doing nothing and is also able to afford new coffee makers, snacks, and other items. Her diligence pays off, but she is again burnt out and quits. Next, she writes advertisements for a local trolly service. However, one of the writers is able to conjure a business just by writing the advertisements (very Twilight Zone). The last job seems the simplest of them all. It just requires sitting in a hut in a park and cutting out tickets, but even that has its own drama.
Funny situations. Ultimately, the problem is the drama she brings to the job. Working too hard at any job leads to burnout. Extra work isn't rewarded—certainly not in the menial work she takes. She goes back to her first job in the end. There is no easier job out there, so she may as well lean into the one that pays more.
A young woman burned out from her job abruptly quits. Working with a temp agency, she wants a simple job like watching paint dry. She'll find that there is no such thing as an easy job.
Her first job is a surveillance job. She must watch a writer sit and do nothing until she discovers stolen rubies in a DVD Case. There is an interesting class difference here as she watched him seemingly doing nothing and is also able to afford new coffee makers, snacks, and other items. Her diligence pays off, but she is again burnt out and quits. Next, she writes advertisements for a local trolly service. However, one of the writers is able to conjure a business just by writing the advertisements (very Twilight Zone). The last job seems the simplest of them all. It just requires sitting in a hut in a park and cutting out tickets, but even that has its own drama.
Funny situations. Ultimately, the problem is the drama she brings to the job. Working too hard at any job leads to burnout. Extra work isn't rewarded—certainly not in the menial work she takes. She goes back to her first job in the end. There is no easier job out there, so she may as well lean into the one that pays more.
elle_gee_likes_books's review against another edition
funny
hopeful
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
bibliophilekiera's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
hopeful
informative
lighthearted
mysterious
relaxing
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
4.5
helhas3letters's review against another edition
funny
lighthearted
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
spenkevich's review against another edition
5.0
I’ve worked quite the variety of jobs. Looking back, an odd job always seems rather surreal as individual jobs seem to exist in their unique culture, an aspect of working life that Kikuko Tsumura deftly captures in There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. As the narrator navigates five different jobs over the course of a year and all the oddities that surround them, I was reminded of my own eclectic mix such as delivering bulk coffee around the midwest, bartending weddings, managing a Goodwill or working for a large park not unlike the final job in the novel. My own park experience mainly consisted of driving a garbage truck or operating a lawn mower, yet any job has it’s unexpected side and our work-crew that bordered on found-family discovered that finding dead bodies was just a fact of the job. It was during the recession while I was still in college and the park was apparently a scenic location for a quiet suicide, and us as the first in every day tended to discover the aftermath. Not to get grim, but this is the sort of element that I found Tsumura’s work really vibes with, always pushing mundane work life towards surrealism but never quite reaching a magical-realism in a way that reminds us that having a job is really quite its own bizarre reality. With humor and a charming wit, the novel follows a narrator who, having left a career due to burnout, skips around the workforce in search of ‘a job that was practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not.’ With each job, Tsumura dives deeper into a darkly-comical investigation of work culture and the grip any job sneaks around you, slowly digging its claws into your life and consuming you in surprising ways as the titular statement that there are no easy jobs becomes evidently clear.
‘Whoever you were, there was a chance that you would end up wanting to run away from a job you had once believed in, that you would stray from the path you were on.’
I simply adored this novel and there were many moments where I found myself nodding along in perhaps too eager of agreement. It is a book that make me laugh, and I loved sailing happily along the prose (beautifully translated by [a:Polly Barton|16470058|Polly Barton|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1677959805p2/16470058.jpg]). It moves like doing a mundane task, though in a way that unlocks it as well and becomes oddly peaceful. Like a mindless task! As someone that quickly gets caught up in analyzing the society of a job, from the interpersonal dynamics and office politics to the ways each job is a window its own unique culture around the job and those who consume your product, the narrator’s observations struck me quite personally and effectively. Each job seems fairly mundane on the surface: watching spy cameras trained on a novelist who doesn’t do much, writing ads that play on a bus route, writing fun facts for cracker packages (such a satisfying phrase, say it out loud slowly a few times), putting up government posters and, finally, sitting in a hut in a park. Yet with each she finds herself drawn deeper into the job and discovering it overwhelming her life, a life that almost doesn’t exist on the page outside the context of her job. In an attempt to escape from her work burn-out, she finds each new job to be just another avenue leading back towards potential burn-out.
While different in tone and aim, Easy Job still makes for a excellent companion to [a:Sayaka Murata|8816506|Sayaka Murata|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1522684114p2/8816506.jpg]’s Convenience Store Woman, beguiling the reader with it’s piercing insights into the workforce that unearth the absurdities we often overlook to get through our days. I appreciated how the novel dipped into absurdities without ever breaking from reality, the closest being the fairly [a:Haruki Murakami|3354|Haruki Murakami|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615497402p2/3354.jpg]-like second job where a coworker may be able to make a business appear or disappear by running bus ads (perhaps unwittingly), but each job has its own surreal quality to it with the postering job being by far my favorite. The book reads as if it could have simply been a collection of job-centered short stories, but Tsumura connects them with an overarching narrative that helps make them something greater than the sum of their parts.
While the book is specifically about Japanese work-culture, something unique and (I’ve been told) more strenuous than the US, it deals in universal existential quandaries of work life that are sure to strike a chord. Work-burnout is real, and seems to be an ever-amalgamating issue as jobs demand more of workers. A recent study in the US showed that 3 in 5 employees report negative impacts of work burnout and 61% of employees say burnout has worsened since the Covid pandemic, returning to regular work with higher expectations, longer hours little increase in pay. Throughout the novel we see many succumb to burnout, with the narrator often being their replacement. Even something seemingly simple as a favorite sports player leaving can be the final straw that makes someone’s already-overworked-and-weary emotional house of cards collapse. Almost everyone in the book seems to be barely holding on.
It almost seems one must either commit fully to a job and let it become them or burnout. We see how something like a lunch group can abate the loneliness, and in each job the narrator finds herself in a new social structure around her job. I find it all too true how a job makes you see the world around you, even otherwise familiar places, in a new light. The world unlocks places or people you never knew were there and you discover vague society of psychographically linked people around the job (like in the cracker package job). I enjoy the way the narrator is often marketing to herself, craving the same meals as the author she watches on the spy camera, or riding the bus and eating at the restaurants from her ad job. And each has its own social structure with employees the narrator is acutely aware of, some more intense where ‘Staff votes left me so much at the mercy of others,’ and some with more freedom but little direction.
‘Yes I’d grown to be crafty, and boy did I work for it.’
With each job we see how it’s inevitable to become too invested. Ideas or possible mysteries catch her attention (is there a ghost in the park? How to stop the predator lurking at bus stops?) and lead to obsessions, and it even explores that awkward feeling that spending your own money is needed to get a feel for the job. I was gripped by the story of the postering job turning into a rivalry with the ominous, vaguely threatening and ‘self-aggrandizing’ vibes of the Lonely No More group that seemed to prey on the loneliness of older people on her route and couldn’t put down the book as I was just as invested in her figuring out who they were as she was. There is this excellently executed off-putting vibe that reminded my of college youth groups marketing themselves in the dorm halls where you’d feel bad at first when people were mean to them but then saw they sort of got off on it in a weird way and it just…felt eerie and awkward. Had this section been expanded as an entire novel I would not have minded. Each story stands as uniquely awesome (the middle few the best) but this one just hit the mark for me. I also found it interesting how much the novel hinted at privatization putting a lot of social service duties on untrained employees who end up looking for missing people or stopping a wave of crime.
There Is No Such Thing as an Easy Job was a blast of joy in my life that I needed just as much as the Spring sunshine finally arriving that coincided with reading this book. It’s offbeat and vaguely dark, but in a way that comforts me deeply and completely harmonizes with my own impressions on job cultures. The narrator’s personal life is teased out through the book, making her almost only a product of her employment than a person at times, but the reveal of her past career also brilliantly puts much of the narrative and her brand of observations into an even more meaningful context than I’d imagined. This was a blast and I honestly didn’t want it to ever end, slowly savoring each section and being as engulfed within the individual job culture as the narrator herself. While there is no easy job, this also arrives at some resignated conclusions about work (though I would have preferred more of a condemnation but hey) and this book is a lovely companion to help see you through all the absurdities and surrealism of your daily grind.
4.5/5
Also a huge shoutout to Nenia for co-reading this with me! Read her amazing review here!
‘Whoever you were, there was a chance that you would end up wanting to run away from a job you had once believed in, that you would stray from the path you were on.’
I simply adored this novel and there were many moments where I found myself nodding along in perhaps too eager of agreement. It is a book that make me laugh, and I loved sailing happily along the prose (beautifully translated by [a:Polly Barton|16470058|Polly Barton|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1677959805p2/16470058.jpg]). It moves like doing a mundane task, though in a way that unlocks it as well and becomes oddly peaceful. Like a mindless task! As someone that quickly gets caught up in analyzing the society of a job, from the interpersonal dynamics and office politics to the ways each job is a window its own unique culture around the job and those who consume your product, the narrator’s observations struck me quite personally and effectively. Each job seems fairly mundane on the surface: watching spy cameras trained on a novelist who doesn’t do much, writing ads that play on a bus route, writing fun facts for cracker packages (such a satisfying phrase, say it out loud slowly a few times), putting up government posters and, finally, sitting in a hut in a park. Yet with each she finds herself drawn deeper into the job and discovering it overwhelming her life, a life that almost doesn’t exist on the page outside the context of her job. In an attempt to escape from her work burn-out, she finds each new job to be just another avenue leading back towards potential burn-out.
While different in tone and aim, Easy Job still makes for a excellent companion to [a:Sayaka Murata|8816506|Sayaka Murata|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1522684114p2/8816506.jpg]’s Convenience Store Woman, beguiling the reader with it’s piercing insights into the workforce that unearth the absurdities we often overlook to get through our days. I appreciated how the novel dipped into absurdities without ever breaking from reality, the closest being the fairly [a:Haruki Murakami|3354|Haruki Murakami|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615497402p2/3354.jpg]-like second job where a coworker may be able to make a business appear or disappear by running bus ads (perhaps unwittingly), but each job has its own surreal quality to it with the postering job being by far my favorite. The book reads as if it could have simply been a collection of job-centered short stories, but Tsumura connects them with an overarching narrative that helps make them something greater than the sum of their parts.
While the book is specifically about Japanese work-culture, something unique and (I’ve been told) more strenuous than the US, it deals in universal existential quandaries of work life that are sure to strike a chord. Work-burnout is real, and seems to be an ever-amalgamating issue as jobs demand more of workers. A recent study in the US showed that 3 in 5 employees report negative impacts of work burnout and 61% of employees say burnout has worsened since the Covid pandemic, returning to regular work with higher expectations, longer hours little increase in pay. Throughout the novel we see many succumb to burnout, with the narrator often being their replacement. Even something seemingly simple as a favorite sports player leaving can be the final straw that makes someone’s already-overworked-and-weary emotional house of cards collapse. Almost everyone in the book seems to be barely holding on.
‘Nobody's life was untouched by loneliness; it was just a question of weather or not you were able to accept that loneliness for what it was. Put another way, everyone was lonely, and it was up to them whether they chose to bury that loneliness through relationships with other people, and if so, of what sort of intensity and depth.’
It almost seems one must either commit fully to a job and let it become them or burnout. We see how something like a lunch group can abate the loneliness, and in each job the narrator finds herself in a new social structure around her job. I find it all too true how a job makes you see the world around you, even otherwise familiar places, in a new light. The world unlocks places or people you never knew were there and you discover vague society of psychographically linked people around the job (like in the cracker package job). I enjoy the way the narrator is often marketing to herself, craving the same meals as the author she watches on the spy camera, or riding the bus and eating at the restaurants from her ad job. And each has its own social structure with employees the narrator is acutely aware of, some more intense where ‘Staff votes left me so much at the mercy of others,’ and some with more freedom but little direction.
‘Yes I’d grown to be crafty, and boy did I work for it.’
With each job we see how it’s inevitable to become too invested. Ideas or possible mysteries catch her attention (is there a ghost in the park? How to stop the predator lurking at bus stops?) and lead to obsessions, and it even explores that awkward feeling that spending your own money is needed to get a feel for the job. I was gripped by the story of the postering job turning into a rivalry with the ominous, vaguely threatening and ‘self-aggrandizing’ vibes of the Lonely No More group that seemed to prey on the loneliness of older people on her route and couldn’t put down the book as I was just as invested in her figuring out who they were as she was. There is this excellently executed off-putting vibe that reminded my of college youth groups marketing themselves in the dorm halls where you’d feel bad at first when people were mean to them but then saw they sort of got off on it in a weird way and it just…felt eerie and awkward. Had this section been expanded as an entire novel I would not have minded. Each story stands as uniquely awesome (the middle few the best) but this one just hit the mark for me. I also found it interesting how much the novel hinted at privatization putting a lot of social service duties on untrained employees who end up looking for missing people or stopping a wave of crime.
There Is No Such Thing as an Easy Job was a blast of joy in my life that I needed just as much as the Spring sunshine finally arriving that coincided with reading this book. It’s offbeat and vaguely dark, but in a way that comforts me deeply and completely harmonizes with my own impressions on job cultures. The narrator’s personal life is teased out through the book, making her almost only a product of her employment than a person at times, but the reveal of her past career also brilliantly puts much of the narrative and her brand of observations into an even more meaningful context than I’d imagined. This was a blast and I honestly didn’t want it to ever end, slowly savoring each section and being as engulfed within the individual job culture as the narrator herself. While there is no easy job, this also arrives at some resignated conclusions about work (though I would have preferred more of a condemnation but hey) and this book is a lovely companion to help see you through all the absurdities and surrealism of your daily grind.
4.5/5
Also a huge shoutout to Nenia for co-reading this with me! Read her amazing review here!