There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

Convenience Store Woman meets My Year of Rest & Relaxation in this strange, compelling, darkly funny tale of one woman's search for meaning in the modern workplace.   

      A young woman walks into an employment agency & requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, & it requires no reading, no writing – & ideally, very little thinking.

      She is sent to a nondescript 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 can be so inconvenient & tiresome. 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?   

Kikuko Tsumura was born in Osaka, Japan. In her first job out of college, Tsumura experienced workplace harassment & quit after ten 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.