An unquiet life

Kikuko Tsumura is a multi-prizewinning Japanese author whose mischievously deceptive new novel takes us into what purports to be the office world of Tokyo. The routine at first seems familiar, but intriguing disparities emerge: the present is also a foreign country. There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job gives us the minutiae of everyday working life — but not as we know it. Think Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine, freed from lunchtime restrictions.

A burnt-out young woman wants a job without responsibility — no stress, no demands. First up: a surveillance assignment observing a novelist suspected of receiving contraband goods. Via hidden cameras, slumped at an office monitor, she keeps watch on him, and as the dead hours unroll she finds herself tracking his TV viewing, craving the food he eats, even criticizing his literary output, sharing ‘if not his joy and sadness, then certainly his boredom’.

The surveillance ends, and she joins a team producing audio ads for a local bus company. Undemanding enough, until she becomes aware that shops and offices on the bus route are mysteriously disappearing, while others appear, unnervingly linked to the ads. With a touch of techno-magic realism, the author slyly questions the relationship between advertising and success or failure — indeed existence itself.

The wittily deadpan translation by Polly Barton has won a PEN prize. What next for our narrator? Digging up fun facts for the back of rice-cracker wrappers. The crackers are delicious (squid and mirin, shredded seaweed and bonito flakes), but her wrapper facts prove disconcertingly popular: fan letters flood in, and responsibility looms. She flees.

Tsumura has a sharp eye for the absurdities of white-collar admin, the solace of workplace friendships, the insidious anxieties, and the consoling siren lure of fast food, but the novel is feeling its way into deeper waters.

The novel’s surreal charm wins through, pointing up the looking-glass aspect of the narrator’s world: confronted by what she’s running away from, the fantastical and the ordinary become interchangeable, as she stumbles into what she’s really been searching for all along.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2021 US edition.