There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

Wise, comical & exceptionally relatable' - Zeba Talkhani, author of My Past is a Foreign Country   

'Quietly hilarious & deeply attuned to the uncanny rhythms & deadpan absurdity of the daily grind' - Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti         

A young woman walks into an employment agency & requests a job that requires no reading, no writing – & ideally, very little thinking.     

She is sent to an office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end isn't so easy. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly – how did she find herself in this situation in the first place?

As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, & composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful...

Kikuko Tsumura was born in Osaka, Japan. In her first job out of college, Tsumura experienced workplace harassment & quit after 10 months to retrain & find another position, an experience that inspired her to write stories about young workers. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards including the Akutagawa Prize & the Noma Literary New Face Prize, & her first short story translated into English, ‘The Water Tower & the Turtle’, won a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology recognized Tsumura’s work with a New Artist award in 2016.

Polly Barton is a translator of Japanese literature & non-fiction, currently based in Bris