So begins a series of mundane gigs: reviewing the surveillance tapes of a writer who rarely leaves his house, putting up PSA posters, writing radio advertisements to be aired on a bus route. (Originally published in Japan in 2015, it has now been translated into English by Polly Barton.) The 36-year-old unnamed narrator, who has left her job of 10 years because of what she calls “burnout syndrome,” shows up at a temp agency and tells her recruiter that she is not interested in a meaningful job she just wants an easy one. Kikuko Tsumura’s novel There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job explores the same issue very differently.
The jobs are painfully dull and sometimes exploitative the workers stuck in them are ambivalent and tend to tell their stories with a jagged, irony-tinged edge. In his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, the late anthropologist David Graeber described a particular type of employment: “If the position were eliminated, it would make no discernable difference in the world.” A bullshit job, he writes, is “so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince himself there’s a good reason for him to be doing so.” This kind of worker abounds in American contemporary fiction, including Hilary Leichter’s Temporary and Halle Butler’s The New Me.
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