There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

Tsumura's novel is starring a woman in her mid-30s, whose unemployment benefits have run out after a long period of recovery from burn-out-syndrome. It is time to get back to the working world again and to find a new job placement. Our female narrator tries various job directions such as desk jobs in advertisement, surveillance, marketing and outside jobs like forest ranger in order to find an easy job which requires less personal and emotional involvement than her last one that led to exhaustion. However, what starts at first as a careful attempt to reconnect with the demands of working life turns out to something very different than what the narrator expected. While on the one hand Tsumura's delightful and entertaining literary style makes one race through the book, it also gives voice to a very profound and insightful reflection on modern society and the omnipresent problem of the so called "work-life-balance". I was repeatedly surprised by Tsumura's most accurate observations with regard to the narrator's own personal growth and the present-day society she is living and working in - as we all do.