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There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

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There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

By: Kikuko Tsumura, Polly Barton - translator
Narrated by: Cindy Kay
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About this listen

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s 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 and 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. But when she finally discovers an alternative to the daily grind, it comes with a price.

This is the first time work by Kikuko Tsumura - winner of Japan's most prestigious literary award - and 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.

©2021 Kikuko Tsumura (P)2021 Dreamscape Media, LLC City Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Urban Women's Fiction Witty
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A very enjoyable mix of Japanese culture and magic realism. Well told, beautifully read.

Something difderent

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You’ll like this if you like the wit of Sōseki’s I am a Cat, as it very much follows in the tradition of dry satire.

Witty, clever book

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This is a gentle book about a 36yo woman from Osaka. Through the book she does five jobs in a year. There is virtually no home life or friends except colleagues but you get a great insight to her life and the culture of her environment.

It is an easy listen and the narrator is pleasing to the ear. I really want to try the various rice crackers from her job at the cracker factory.

Japanese cultural writing -interesting

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I enjoyed this. Somewhat bizarre and darkly funny. Won't be everyone's cup of tea but if you like reading something that's unusual, quite Japanese in flavour, with subtle wit, then you might like this. The story is part existential journey, part mystery, lyrically wrtten, and well narrated.

Quirky and outlandish

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