Overview

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--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.

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9781662068195

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Kikuko Tsumura is a writer from Osaka, Japan. She has won the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and numerous Japanese literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, Noma Literary Prize, and Dazai Osamu Prize. Cindy Kay is an audiobook narrator who enjoys knitting, adding to her massive list of restaurants to try, suffering with friends in group exercise classes and telling stories to people she's never met. She was raised in the California Bay Area.

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