There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

by Kikuko Tsumura

Both screens showed the same person.

Started 2/4/24

It’s because you do this kind of thing that you’re making such poor progress with your work, I counselled him in my head, but then I stopped and remembered my own habits. After getting home from work, it wasn’t unheard of for me to while away the precious window of time afforded me looking endlessly at things of no consequence on the internet.

Remember how silly you find the target’s time-wasting, and don’t do it yourself.

Yet morning dawns, even on nights filled with thoughts as dark as yesterday’s.

Of course, nobody likes it when their home and workplace are too far apart, but too near isn’t great either. You end up going straight into work without having the chance to shake off any of that just-woken-up daze.

I paused the image from the day before yesterday, leaned all my weight on the armrests of the office chair and let my head loll back. What a wretched life I led! And yes, I knew. Of course I knew that there were innumerable things in this world incomparably much harder and more terrible than what I was going through right then. But just for that moment, I wanted permission to crank my unhappiness gauge to the max. I’d dial it back down, I promised to dial it back down right away. By the day after tomorrow at the latest.

‘The TV guy had three kids, and he was just so, like, dictatorial with them. At mealtimes, he’d tell his kids “Hurry up and eat, you dumb little shit.” There’s no way I’d say that to my kids, if I had any. But then I’m not married. Actually, I can’t even find a girlfriend, and I’m stuck doing this super-nothingy job. I sort of worry about myself sometimes.’

There was an etiquette that has to be upheld by those being watched, as well as by those watching, after all.

Standing there, I sensed myself split between the intuition that I would feel a lot better if she would just leave me alone, and a more circumspect element that told me she might help me find another job so I’d better pull myself together.

I didn’t want to have any more feelings about my work than were strictly necessary. I was done with all that.

She had mentioned to me that through recording the adverts, she’d learned of shops and clinics whose existence she’d never previously been aware of – ‘you realise there’s so much about your own neighbourhood you don’t know,’ she’d said ponderously.

Looking up at the windows framed in their yellow curtains of an almost eerie radiance, it occurred to me that maybe the problem wasn’t how little I knew my neighbourhood. Maybe it was that my neighbourhood was morphing into a place I didn’t know.

I fell deep into thought – except I didn’t have enough material to facilitate particularly deep thinking, so my thoughts circulated the same territory over and over.

It seemed like a good opportunity to make it clear to this upstart how revealing disdain for other people’s work could be just as humiliating as being the target of that disdain.

Just having to choose felt stressful. I wanted to return to that period when all I needed to do was work, and the time would pass of its own accord.

‘Ah, what a bind,’ I said, although I knew that however much of a bind I might have felt my current situation to be, it didn’t alter the fact that I had to keep on working, which meant I had to keep on moving forward.

Source That Word! #11: 横好き (yokozuki) As in the phrase ‘heta no yokozuki’, meaning a person who is passionate about something they show no particular talent for. Here ‘yoko’ (‘side’) indicates something peripheral to one’s main career, while ‘suki’ means like.

The fact that my office was so sunny also made things hard. The director had told me it was fine to go and work in the local library, but when I actually tried to do so I found myself drawn exclusively to books with no relation to the subject I was supposed to be researching, in what was clearly a subconscious bid to escape the reality of my present situation – meaning I made no progress whatsoever.

When I decided to feature her particular character for ‘yoshi’ (佳) in the first instalment of the series, divulging that it carried the meanings ‘beautiful’, ‘excellent’ and ‘good’, she was delighted, and told me that she’d presented a sample packet as an offering at her home altar.

I’d previously been worried that I wouldn’t ever be able to come up with any good ideas, but gradually I was coming around to a different mindset: if you fired off enough ideas, you were bound to eventually hit upon a winner. The key was to keep churning them out.

After having to leave my old job because of burnout syndrome, I was rationally aware that it wasn’t a good idea to get too emotionally involved in what I was doing, but it was also difficult to prevent myself from taking satisfaction in it. Truthfully, I was happy when people took pleasure in my work, and it made me want to try harder.

My lunchmates had plentiful intuition and a total absence of mercy.

The web page in question, which featured a discussion about the various ways to bring your broken ceramics back to life, also mentioned kintsugi – the technique where you stuck together the broken parts using lacquer and dusted it with powdered gold. The gold seams gave the repaired item a certain stylishness you didn’t get from just sticking the pieces together using glue.

Since starting the Ms Fujiko job, I’d come to the realisation that I was really bad at giving advice, and that I knew absolutely nothing about anything.

Whatever job I ended up doing next would be tough until I got used to it, but it was bound to be something to which I was better suited.

‘You look so tired,’ she said suddenly, after she’d reached the end of her tale. ‘You should rest! It doesn’t do to be thinking about work all hours of the day, you know.’

From the angle of her head and the look of her eyes with their big irises, I understood that Mrs Fujiko could see that my soul had seized up and grown stiff. I felt a sudden urge to kick the coffee table away and hurl my teacup at the wall.

I wanted to laugh at their expense. I mean, come on! ‘DIE ALONE’ was such a ridiculously theatrical message. There was such an excessive amount of hatred packed into those two short words. Besides, I’d realised that its function as an insult depended on certain assumptions about its intended target. What if its recipient wasn’t at all bothered about dying or being alone? It was branded all over with the value system of its author. You could practically hear them shriek: I’D RATHER DIE THAN DIE ALONE!!!

Nobody’s life was untouched by loneliness; it was just a question of whether or not you were able to accept that loneliness for what it was. Put another way, everyone was lonely, and it was up to them whether they chose to bury that loneliness through relationships with other people, and if so, of what sort of intensity and depth.

‘But you’ve got to at least try it, otherwise you won’t have even made it to the threshold of life.’

I should probably have talked to my friends about it, but they were almost all of a similar age to me, and were also just gritting their teeth and clinging on as best they could, so it hardly felt right to drone on about my problems.

There were so many different ways of garnering people’s trust, I reflected.

When I went into work the morning after my day off – a day that more or less hadn’t existed as far as I was concerned – there was a pile of posters sitting on top of the meeting desk, curling at the ends.

For quite some while I stood still, staring dumbly up at the building in front of me. The nine o’clock morning light reflected off the white pearlescent tiles, making the building shimmer like a mirage.

Really and truly, I didn’t care. At this moment in time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work at all. Were I to be told there weren’t any jobs available, I’d probably just nod and quietly make my way back home. Equally, if I was asked if I was available to go and work for a construction company in Dubai, I was likely to say, quite offhand, that I was up for it.

For no reason I properly understood, talking with Mrs Masakado here today, I felt that a hole had opened up in my heart. If being busy would prevent me from having to look at that hole, I could probably handle any kind of job.

I owed a lot to Mrs Masakado, I thought, and however strange a job it might have been, it was better to act while people still had high expectations for you, and so I nodded. ‘Okay, sure, I’ll give it a go.’

I was aware it was something of a bad habit of mine to feel, after a very short time on a job, that I had grasped its essence, but when the bento box that Miss Kudō delivered at midday was genuinely delicious, I couldn’t shake off the exhilarated sensation rising up inside me.

I wasn’t holding out any particularly high expectations for this job, but I did hope it would serve as a foothold in locating something better afterwards.

It was as heavy as one might imagine a box packed full of tickets to be, and I felt simple gratitude washing over me at having a task to fill my time.

‘He was having a really hard time at work. I don’t know what his actual role was, but he kept using the words “emotional labour”.

I felt rather dissatisfied but then, as I suddenly realised, I always felt like that of late.

I liked this job quite a lot, but I ended up feeling unconditional respect for anybody who engaged in their work with such passion. I was all too aware that such a trait was destined to cause me a lot of hardship in my working life.

‘I just felt like I didn’t understand a thing any more. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, what I was living for.’

Having turned my back on the job that I’d decided to spend the majority of my life doing, unexpected encounters with those who were still in that same profession made me feel not just awkward, but envious as well.

Whoever you were, there was a chance that you would end up wanting to run away from a job you had once believed in, that you would stray from the path you were on.

There are pitfalls like that everywhere, lying in wait to trip you up. The more feeling you put into your work or whatever it is you’re devoting yourself to, the more of them there are.

‘Accepting those ups and downs, choosing to take on difficult jobs – that’s what life is about. That was the conclusion I came to.’

The time had come to embrace the ups and downs again. I had no way of knowing what pitfalls might be lying in wait for me, but what I’d discovered by doing five jobs in such a short span of time was this: the same was true of everything. You never knew what was going to happen, whatever you did. You just had to give it your all, and hope for the best. Hope like anything it would turn out alright.