An unquiet life: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura, reviewed

Kikuko Tsumura is a multi-prizewinning Japanese author whose mischievously deceptive new novel takes us into what purports to be the office world of Tokyo. The routine at first seems familiar, but intriguing disparities emerge: the present is also a foreign country. There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job gives us the minutiae of everyday working life — but not as we know it. Think Diary of a Nobody without the Pooterish self-regard. Or Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine, freed from lunchtime restrictions.

A burnt-out young woman wants a job without responsibility — no stress, no demands. First up: a surveillance assignment observing a novelist suspected of receiving contraband goods. Via hidden cameras, slumped at an office monitor, she keeps watch on him, and as the dead hours unroll she finds herself tracking his TV viewing, craving the food he eats, even criticising his literary output, sharing ‘if not his joy and sadness, then certainly his boredom’.