KIKUKO TSUMURA There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Tags: Japanese fiction/ jobs/ Kikuki Tsumura/ Theres No Such Thing As An Easy Job/ work

Kikuko Tsumura’s debut novel explores how even a seemingly simple task can become unexpectedly complicated.

This whole situation had come to be because I’d sat down one day in front of my recruiter and informed her that I wanted a job as close as possible to my house – ideally, something along the lines of sitting all day in a chair, overseeing the extraction of collagen for use in skin products.

So says a single 36-year-old Japanese woman who has just left a job she has worked in for 14 years because it had ‘sucked up every scrap’ of her energy. Living with her parents until her unemployment insurance runs out is fine for a while, but she knows that ‘hanging around doing nothing forever’ is not a long-term solution.

So, maybe monitoring secret cameras installed in the home of a writer who is believed to have unknowingly been given ‘hot stuff’ contraband by a friend will be a ‘cushy’ job. This is the first job taken by Kikuko Tsumura’s heroine. We never learn her name, but as we follow her through several temporary jobs we find that she is sympathetic, inventive, wary but friendly with any fellow workers, prone to adding innovative changes to repetitive tasks, and that she enjoys snacks like ‘Natto and Cheese Thins (With Wasabi!)’, breadfruit crisps (she considers making her own), and various tasty-sounding bento box selections, such as the one from the Gifts of the Forest shop – ‘tofu burger, salt-and-pepper flavoured breadfruit crisps, a salad of kale, quinoa and nuts, and slices of persimmon for dessert’.

Kikuko Tsumura is clearly as inventive as her heroine. The five jobs this young woman takes involve surveillance; helping to write brief advertisements to be broadcast on the local bus; devising and writing slogans for small, individual packets of rice crackers; putting up posters in the local area; and perforating and separating piles of tickets for an exhibition. She is good at all these jobs but each one turns out to have a mystery or an added task that begins to consume her attention and cause her stress. Often, since she is innovative, she is the cause of her own problems.

Boring as the jobs are, her interaction with those she meets and works with and her involvement with strange aspects of the various jobs keep her, and the reader, interested. Firstly, she solves the problem of the hidden contraband. Then in a new job, helping to write the brief, chatty advertisements for local businesses to be aired on the bus, she is also asked to ‘keep an eye on’ Ms Eriguchi, with whom she works, and to report anything she notices that seems strange. This puzzling instruction eventually seems to be linked to the way the small businesses Ms Eriguchi promotes seem to suddenly pop up, then, if their advertisement is stopped, to inexplicably vanish.

When this job ends, something similar is offered: devising slogans for the backs of small packages of rice crackers. Here Kikuko Tsumura’s own inventiveness has clearly been vital. Initially, her heroine simply works with the topics chosen by her predecessor, but when she has to choose new topics, which she is instructed to make ‘accessible to everyone from ten to 90, and also avoid anything too safe’, her imagination freezes. A comment by her boss about weird names sets her off on new, but intensive, research and the topic she devises is ‘Know Your Name’. Each packet deals with a different ‘kanji’ – a Chinese character used in the Japanese language.

The first name of Mrs Nihei, with whom I ate lunch, was Yoshino. She said that her parents had died relatively young and she’d never had the chance to ask them properly about why they’d chosen the name for her. When I decided to feature her particular character for ‘yoshi’… divulging that it carried the meanings ‘beautiful’, ‘excellent’ and ‘good’, she was delighted, and told me that she’d presented a sample packet as an offering at her home altar. That was really nice for me to hear.

Other topics are equally inventive and popular, but then a new product poses problems. Suggested topics are voted on by the staff and she has three to offer, none of them very inspiring:

The vote would most likely go to 100 famous Japanese mountains, which hadn’t even been my idea in the first place, but that was fine. I honestly didn’t care any more, I thought, as I headed for the canteen.

Standing there slumped in the line for food, the phrase ran through my head – ‘rice crackers for exhausted people’. They would probably suit me very well in my current state.

Eventually the parameters of the job change, the work becomes too intensive, and she decides not to renew her contract.

Each temporary job has its curious aspects. The poster distribution job starts well but turns out to have unexpected social complications that lead to its end, and in the final job, which she finds almost ideal, odd things begin to happen, and there are suggestions of ghosts and of a yeti-like creature lurking among the woods.

Finally, the young woman we have come to know finishes this last job. In every job, she concludes, ‘you just have to give it your all and hope for the best’. But if you do that, as she has learned, there really is no such thing as an easy job. So, she feels it is time to again ‘embrace the ups and downs’ of her former career.

Kikuko Tsumura has won awards for her short story writing, and this is her first novel to be translated into English. It is like a linked series of short stories with an interesting Japanese flavour, and her translator, Polly Barton, has done an excellent job, making the text fluent and easy to read without losing its unique character.

Kikuko Tsumura There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job Bloomsbury 2020 PB 416pp $29.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (//ann.skea.com/) are archived by the British Library.

You can buy There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.

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