Review by Booklist Review
The first English-translated novel from multiple-award-winning Japanese writer Tsumura examines the unforeseen consequences of seemingly easy jobs and the search for meaningful employment. After experiencing burnout syndrome at a job she loved, the narrator visits an employment agency that sends her to work at a surveillance office. It seems like the ideal employment: close to home, minimal conversations with colleagues, and the simple task of watching video footage of her target, a novelist. However, as her target spends long hours idling away in his home, the narrator finds herself becoming subconsciously invested in his life. She decides to transfer to a bus company writing advertisements, but later moves on to a rice-cracker company penning advice, and so on. As she hops from job to job, the narrator meets various characters who help her realize what she needs to do with her life and career. Tsumura's novel is witty and subtly humorous as it takes a look at the nature of work from a Japanese point of view.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Tsumura's sharp English-language debut follows a woman's search for fulfillment in an all-consuming late-capitalist Japan. The unnamed narrator suffers career burnout at 36 and abandons her job (she's coy until the end about the details). When her unemployment insurance runs out, she reenters the workforce, seeking a position "that was practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not." What follows is a series of increasingly strange and occasionally surreal temporary gigs. In one, she monitors hours of video footage from surveillance cameras placed in an author's house and begins to find her preferences and identity merging with his; in another, she writes copy for voice advertisements on buses, but the businesses she's writing for mysteriously appear and disappear. Though she attempts to maintain emotional distance from her work, the narrator is drawn into a consuming series of workplace situations; while working on a maintenance crew for a national park, she encounters a man living in the woods who succumbed to a similar burnout. Tsumura's rendering of a millennial besieged by anxious overthinking and coping through deadpan humor and sarcasm rings true. As the monotonous and fantastic collide, Tsumura shows that meaning and real intrigue can be found in the unlikeliest of places. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In Tsumura's English-language debut, an easy job is hard to come by. Over the past few years, there's been a surge of novels centered around millennial women disillusioned with the modern workplace. They're part of a genre that's taken the unattainable ideals of late capitalism to task with dark humor. Tsumura's novel gingerly joins those ranks thanks to a protagonist who's still recuperating from "burnout syndrome." After leaving what she thought was the job she'd always wanted, the book's narrator--a 36-year-old woman who's left nameless--moves back in with her parents and begins to search for an "easy job." Essentially a perma-temp, she idly floats from one uneventful gig to another--surveilling a hidden-camera feed, writing bus advertisements, punching tickets for a public park--leaving each one the moment she excels. The irony is that as much as she wants to coast through life, she can't resist the seductive pull of its small thrills, however mundane they may be. Tsumura's droll wit is so subtle it's almost imperceptible. It's the kind that challenges the reader to pay close attention to the nuances at work beneath the narrative. When strange occurrences begin to tail our hapless narrator, the book takes on an unsettling quality but also that of a cozy mystery. To say the least, it has a strange, almost calming effect, like the serenity that comes from building out a perfect spreadsheet. By the book's end, you realize you've just taken a 400-page tour through the lonely world of entry-level jobs, and somehow it leaves you feeling weirdly optimistic. One thing's for certain: You won't have to work to enjoy this book. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
