Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job (Polly Barton, trans.)

I’ve been rereading Kikuko Tsumura’s weirdly hypnotic There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job. This book comes back to me often, like a song, where you remember the feeling and bits of the tune more than the words. The novel’s narrator, whose name we never learn, is trying, through her series of jobs, to find a place in the world that she can reasonably inhabit. An “easy job.” A job “practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not.” One that won’t tear at her heart. The character became completely burnt out in her previous work (we don’t learn what that was or what happened until quite late in the book). She’s been living listlessly with her parents, unable even to read, and when she returns to work, at first all she asks for is a job close to home. The book is funny, weird, and still captures something of what it means to earn a living at these precarious jobs: the mixture of confinement, repetitive tasks, tentative or unexpected companionship, loneliness, and a struggle against pointlessness, which the narrator here manages through a sprightly cheerful thoughtfulness. Her obsessively wandering mind runs underneath and around her helpful daylight self, both insightful and in denial. Her delightful, confiding direct way of talking to the reader offers an apparent intimacy that initially hides anything deeper, not only from us but, it seems, from herself. 

Each chapter is named after one of her jobs,  “The Surveillance Job,” “The Bus Advertising Job,” “The Cracker Packet Job,” “The Postering Job,” and “The Easy Job in the Hut in the Big Forest.” Along the way, we learn a very little more about what happened to her, what went wrong before the start of the book.

“The Surveillance Job”

At the first of these jobs, she watches surveillance footage of “the target,” a novelist suspected of receiving contraband packages. Mostly, though, he types, researches maté, and makes dinner. She’s hungry and wants to go out, but in a moment of great excitement, discovers that he’s jumping up to receive delivery of a mysterious box. Which contains cookies. She watches him sort them out, thinks about the effect of the eye drops she needs because of the job, and then directly addresses the reader:  

I know, I know. This was the train of thought of a person with far too much time on their hands. But guess what: with this job I did have too much time on my hands. It was weird because I work such long hours, and yet, even while working, I was basically doing nothing. I’d come to the conclusion that there were very few jobs in the world that ate up as much time and as little brainpower as watching over the life of a novelist who lived alone and worked from home.  

Although there is a reason for her to be surveilling him, and we learn more about it as the chapter goes on, she’s mostly obsessed with how and when she gets to eat and the office rules that keep her from getting food. She winds up in another job, then another, anxious about not living up to the expectations of the employment center and Mrs. Masakado, her surreally understanding and gentle recruiter, who places her in each of these jobs.

“The Postering Job”

Our narrator is touchingly, admirably conscientious, increasingly invested in each job, accepting the generally kindly people and their hierarchies (including the reality that it’s all men at the top; although tacitly, this may be part of what drives her away from the jobs where she has no power). She’s always looking for what she can contribute in small ways. As she gets drawn further and further in, each job turns into something else, as when writing entertaining copy for packets of rice crackers leads her into the position of receiving a flood of letters from people desperate for advice.

Stuck in between the feeling that others are after her job and also that she’s in too deep, she leaves once again and winds up with a job for a company contracting with a government agency to put up posters “promoting road safety awareness and so on.”  

She sees this as a chance to work outside and alone and takes the job, which, once again starts out simply. She likes the “traffic safety, tree planting and water conservation” posters with their “eye-catching compositions” and a “bold yet simple colour palette.” They remind her, pleasingly, of “Eastern European or vintage Soviet poster design.” Before long, she’s once again becoming part of the culture and concerns of the company, even to the extent of investigating a rival organization that displaces her company’s posters with their own: 

I hadn’t yet perfected the knack of bringing around those with Lonely No More! posters, but for the rest of the day I felt very high levels of professional commitment. Thinking that a better understanding of the people living in the neighbourhood would help with my work, I struck up conversations with everyone I met, listening to their complaints and concerns. Granted, there were the odd few who were having none of it, but I found that so long as you asked your questions earnestly, made it clear you weren’t trying to exploit anyone in any way, and then hung on their every word with great interest, the majority of people would share something that was on their mind. Their concerns ran the gamut – from how expensive vegetables were of late, or how they had become addicted to a game on their smartphone, or how dull TV programmes were – to how their grandchild didn’t seem to be warming to them, or how their husband had lost his job and was forever out playing pachinko, or how since being made redundant they’d noticed how wasteful their wife was with money, or how until now they’d been really content being single, but now the friends they went out drinking with were all sick and suddenly they were feeling quite alone. Leaving aside the question of whether said worries were reasonable concerns or had grown out of some kind of indolence on their part, there was nobody without anxieties of some kind. And so, Lonely No More! would muscle their way in and provide an explanation – ‘the reason you’re addicted to your smartphone is because you’re lonely,’ or ‘your wife wastes so much money because she’s lonely’ – to which their organization just happened to offer a seemingly perfect solution.  

To believe that such tactics wouldn’t work for most, because the bulk of people had managed to procure the relationships they needed in their lives, and wouldn’t go leaping voluntarily into a connection that a strange young man or woman who’d popped up out of the blue tried to forge with them, was overly optimistic. In reality, when issued an invitation by a good-looking youngster who was sympathetic to their predicament, there were a lot of people who would fall for it.

Her investigative technique of listening to everyone’s anxieties and considering the nature of loneliness feels true to who she is, who she can’t help being. In craft terms, Tsumura’s found a great way of creating this character through her attention to everyone around her, especially strangers. Apart from our narrator’s passion for food, her biggest interest seems to be in these other little-known lives. The concerns she learns about feel both quite specific (a smartphone addiction, a painfully distant grandchild, a husband who’s lost his job and is out playing pachinko) and also universal.

Lonely No More! is not exactly wrong about their audience: all these characters’ willingness to tell their stories to a sympathetic stranger is more evidence that they are right. And the desperation of their new adherents, their individual predicaments, echoes what our narrator encountered in the cracker packet job.

Lonely No More! is also, naturally, profiting from their endeavor.  Her older co-worker Mrs. Ōmae talks about their own office and Lonely No More! over tea and homemade inari-zushi: 

‘I guess [the office] must have opened about two months after Lonely No More! turned up. At that time, everyone was accepting their pamphlets and going along to their socials, just like they suggested. I guess you could say they were all pretty lonely. That was when Mr. Monaga set up the office. At the start, it was him who went around putting up posters and asking people questions. He passed along the information he gleaned further up the chain, and then occasionally people from the town hall would come out to the area. The situation’s already a lot better than how it used to be.’  

‘What is it that Lonely No More! want, ultimately?’  

I could hardly believe that I’d managed to get to this point without grasping the answer to such a crucial question, but I’d been so absorbed in the nitty-gritty of my job that I hadn’t even thought it through properly. Mrs Ōmae shook her head as she raised her cup to her lips.  

‘Oh, lots of things. They get you to confess your worries at their free socials, and then they ask you along to different, more serious socials. Those you have to pay for. From there, they sift out the people who are willing to pay whatever it takes to avoid being lonely, and invite them to dinner parties. Of course, those also cost money. They also list information about everyone who comes to their meets, including all their worries, and then they send around whichever Lonely No More! member they think a particular individual would be most likely to trust, and have them try to gain access to their house. I’ve heard that people rewrite their wills so as to leave the organisation all their possessions.’ 

‘I see,’ I said, nodding. I didn’t feel particularly angry. It struck me that these kinds of things happened everywhere. If old age found you lonely, maybe you’d want to leave your possessions to someone who’d made you feel less so, even if just for a little while.

The narrator’s response to this discovery perfectly captures the way she can’t help being drawn in. She’s torn, again, between the “nitty-gritty,” the daily details of her work, and her pragmatic generosity. She (and Tsumura) understands loneliness, betrayal, chicanery. And though, as a temporary worker, she’s never fully part of any of these companies, she’s always valuable to them, even if that rarely makes her situation less precarious. She wants to stay out of human life, in all its messiness and demands and uncertainties. Over the course of the novel, it becomes more and more apparent how impossible this is for her. There’s no such thing as an easy job for someone who cannot help being drawn into helping.