I’ve been rereading Kikuko Tsumura’s weirdly hypnotic There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job. This book comes back to me often, like a song, where you remember the feeling and bits of the tune more than the words. The novel’s narrator, whose name we never learn, is trying, through her series of jobs, to find a place in the world that she can reasonably inhabit. An “easy job.” A job “practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not.” One that won’t tear at her heart. The character became completely burnt out in her previous work (we don’t learn what that was or what happened until quite late in the book). She’s been living listlessly with her parents, unable even to read, and when she returns to work, at first all she asks for is a job close to home. The book is funny, weird, and still captures something of what it means to earn a living at these precarious jobs: the mixture of confinement, repetitive tasks, tentative or unexpected companionship, loneliness, and a struggle against pointlessness, which the narrator here manages through a sprightly cheerful thoughtfulness. Her obsessively wandering mind runs underneath and around her helpful daylight self, both insightful and in denial. Her delightful, confiding direct way of talking to the reader offers an apparent intimacy that initially hides anything deeper, not only from us but, it seems, from herself.