RaveThe NationThe tension in There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is born from the narrator’s perfect certainty about what she wants from a job—boring nothingness, for a paycheck—and her seeming inability to remain disinterested, emotionally removed ... Though the book is studded with characters who struggle with burnout, lopsided work-life balances, and exhausting emotional labor, these sorts of laments are not as frequent as they are in other contemporary office novels, which tend to wallow in the abject cheerlessness of work itself ... Tsumura’s narrator bears none of these characteristics: She is a frank and sympathetic observer of her own life and the lives of her coworkers. In another book, her sincere reflections on the true spirit of working life could be read as a bit pat, but in There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, they are quietly moving ... It is almost a tired trope now that protagonists grope toward an epiphany that typically arrives at the plot’s climax. Since our narrator reaches hers before we even meet her—work sucks, basically—the events of the book seem to happen in reverse. After flitting from job to job, she is back where she started. Of course, this is another well-trod convention: The hero goes out on a quest to find love, clarity, spiritual fulfillment, etc., and realizes what they were searching for was at home all along. What is most compelling about There Is No Such Thing as an Easy Job is what happens in between, the way Tsumura’s narrator tries to keep work separate from life and the way life keeps creeping in. Because isn’t it usually the other way around?
