There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
Kikuko Tsumura
(Author)
Description
[A] 21st-century response to Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener.'--NPR
A revelation.--Time 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. Her first gig--watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods--turns out to be inconvenient. (When can she go to the bathroom?) Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job--writing trivia for rice cracker packages; punching entry tickets to a purportedly haunted public park--it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful. And when she finally discovers an alternative to the daily grind, it comes with a price. This is the first time Kikuko Tsumura--winner of Japan's most prestigious literary award--has been translated into English. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job is as witty as it is unsettling--a jolting look at the maladies of late capitalist life through the unique and fascinating lens of modern Japanese culture.Product Details
Price
$18.00
$16.74
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing
Publish Date
March 23, 2021
Pages
416
Dimensions
5.5 X 8.1 X 1.2 inches | 0.9 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781635576917
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About the Author
Kikuko Tsumura is a writer from Osaka, Japan. She is the winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and numerous Japanese literary awards including the Akutagawa Prize, Noma Literary Prize, Dazai Osamu Prize, and a New Artist award.
Polly Barton is a translator based in Bristol. Winner of the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs's International Translation Competition, she has received the Kyoko Selden Memorial Translation Prize and the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize.Reviews
"A revelation." --Time, Best New Books
"Tsumura's rendering of a millennial besieged by anxious overthinking and coping through deadpan humor and sarcasm rings true. As the monotonous and fantastic collide, Tsumura shows that meaning and real intrigue can be found in the unlikeliest of places." --Publishers Weekly "A wise, comical and exceptionally relatable novel on finding meaning and purpose in our work lives." --Zeba Talkhani, author of MY PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY "Quietly hilarious and deeply attuned to the uncanny rhythms and deadpan absurdity of the daily grind, Kikuko Tsumura's postmodern existential workplace saga both skewers and celebrates our deeply human need to function in society and keep surviving in an oftentimes senseless-seeming world." --Sharlene Teo, author of PONTI "A delightfully strange tale of one young woman's search for meaningful work." --The Bookseller, Editor's Choice "Read it before you burn out" --Asahi Shimbun Weekly AERA "The fantastical flavour of this book is one of its charms ... This is a masterpiece of a book about the working world" --Bunshun Toshokan, Kentaro Tomoda "Spending time in the author's unique world, which seems so bizarre and random but is in fact artfully designed, I found myself healed and restored" --Asahi Shimbun, Kazufumi Watanabe