There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Publication date: November 26th 2020 

Pages: 416

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is the eccentric story of a 36 year old woman (she doesn't have a forename in the story, we just see her as the narrator of the story) that walks into an employment agency, looking for the job that suits her perfectly;it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and if possible very little thinking. Exactly what she wants after she suffered from a burnout and moved back to her parents' home.

In the following parts of the story, she takes on different jobs. They don't connect in any way, and feel or more like separate short stories. She takes on jobs as checking surveillance footage in an typical Japanese office with cruelly long working hours deep into the night. She writes scripts for voice ads played on buses, writes copy for cracker wrappers; putting up posters, and monitoring a quiet segment of a large public park. In all her different job assignments, there are all kind of things happening, and she meets a cast of very different people.

And that is pretty much the setup of the story. The begin part was a bit odd and messy, as the main character has no name it was a bit difficult to figure out who she was and to connect to it as a reader. Especially the very odd first job checking surveillance cameras where she wasn't doing anything but some kind of spying on everyone in the office. It was entertaining to read though as it was so different then any other book. The book reminded me a bit of another book by a Japanese author I read a while ago The woman in the purple skirt by Natsuko Imamura , also with a nameless main character and  also with various unusual job settings, and the same kind of atmospere. 

Overall I found this book just eccentric thats what I loved about it, with a typical Japanese atmosphere, the most unusual jobs with unexpected twist and turns, and a crazy cast of side characters that come along with the jobs. If you are in for something different, unusual and out of the box, this is your kind of book.