There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

by Kikuko Tsumura

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.

If there were any spare seconds in the morning before work, I wanted to spend them sleeping.

Standing there alone in the kitchen, clutching a can of coffee of a make I didn’t even particularly like, 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.

When Mrs Masakado enquired about the nature of the position, she was told it was ‘composing content for cracker wrappers’. ‘Don’t they ask people from outside the company to do that kind of thing?’ I asked her. ‘The director told me that it was considered a really crucial role, and they didn’t want someone to be doing it alongside other work.’ ‘They want someone who’s there exclusively to think about cracker wrappers?’ ‘It seems so.’ The words ‘really crucial role’ made me feel an instant sense of pressure.

I wasn’t so convinced that fatigue from looking for a wife was a valid reason for depression, but at least it seemed unrelated to the job.

The cracker I chomped through as I listened to the director’s explanation was genuinely tasty.

‘We think it’s important that people enjoy themselves when they’re eating crackers.’

It seemed that the director had fixed in his mind an image of a young child and his grandmother enjoying a packet of rice crackers together. In his understanding, the kid was ten, and the grandmother was ninety. Afterwards, it occurred to me that there were very few ten-year-olds with ninety-year-old grandmothers. I fretted about whether or not to tell him.

‘I can never find a rubber when I need one,’ said another;

With the problem of never having a rubber to hand, I advised building up a stock by buying one every time the person saw one for a whole week.

‘I quit my job because I wasn’t getting on with my colleagues. Hearing my friends talk about all the nasty people at their workplaces, I don’t feel like ever working again. Does working make you meaner?’ Including my first workplace, which I’d quit because of burnout syndrome, I’d worked in four different places so far, and sure, there had been people with whom I hadn’t especially got along, but I’d never experienced anyone being out-and-out mean to me. It seemed that if people had any scrap of energy to spare, they preferred to put it to use either in doing their job, or in their private life, rather than in being cruel to others. But then, when I thought back to the part-time jobs I’d had as a student, I realised I had endured my fair share of unpleasant run-ins, so it wasn’t like I couldn’t understand this person’s point entirely.

As usual, the topics tended towards the weighty side: ‘I’m married, but I’ve fallen in love with someone at work who says she feels the same. Should I split up with my wife?’ and ‘My mother-in-law blatantly prefers one of my twins,’ and ‘My son spends 100,000 yen a month on anime figurines.’ We also received an entry that seemed to form a perfect pair with the ‘I’m married’ one, revealing, ‘I’ve fallen in love with my married boss,’ so it seemed entirely possible that the writers were co-conspirators. I had no conception of why such people had decided to seek advice about such things from a rice cracker company. Was there no limit to how inappropriately a person could behave?

‘And do you have any concerns?’

‘Yokohama DeNA BayStars have been performing so badly recently,’

the kinds of people who wormed their way into the cracks in people’s psyches, then poked their little needles in to create punctures. Their modus operandi was generally either to suddenly withdraw their support when it was most needed, or else to rely on people’s desire for information they happened to possess. Either way, sometimes they themselves didn’t have any awareness of what it was they were doing, so when they made their initial approach, you wouldn’t have the faintest suspicion of their ill intentions.

Listen, pal, I addressed the young man in my mind, if I want help, I’ll consult a professional or someone I trust, not a stranger who tries to fabricate weakness in others for themselves to inhabit.

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.

I imagined it must be their philosophy not to get too caught up in extraneous details like ticket design and printing and what have you, and that they’d rather go straight in for the kill with the strength of their exhibition content.

I did sense that she struggled to separate fantasy from reality – that she was slightly too neurotic for her own good. You came across such people from time to time. Mostly they weren’t bad sorts, but as you talked with them, they would gradually reveal their particular hang-ups and fixations. They didn’t seek to impose those fixations on others, and in that sense they were harmless, but they themselves were incapable of stepping free of their anxiety, even if provided with material that should by rights have assuaged it.

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.

Sometime around this point I began thinking about my old job – my first job. I didn’t believe for a second I could ever do anything like that specific role again, but I could sense the unshakeable feeling I’d had when I’d quit – of not wanting to work ever again and especially not in that field – gradually receding from my body.

it was a book. The book was entitled Deconstructing and Rebuilding Care, and it was wedged face down in the branch of a tree, at a height I could just about reach if I jumped. By some bizarre coincidence, it was a book I’d heard of though I’d not read it. A colleague at my former workplace had recommended it to me. It had come out the year before last and hadn’t sold at all well, but had made waves among those in my former field of work. As far as I could see from looking up at it from below, the book was well thumbed, and there were lots of little paper tags poking out of it. I looked around to see if there was anything of note in the vicinity, and saw a big patch of wild shiitake growing at the base of a nearby tree. I pulled out the map, and in the blank space, wrote ‘Tree with shiitake (book)’.

Maybe he was just sick and tired of everything, and there was nothing to tether him to the real world. The only things he’d lost out on by going AWOL were the trust of society and a roof to live under. I remembered what Miss Kudō had said about the man who I imagined was Mr Sugai: he was having a tough time at work, and kept using the words ‘emotional labour’. The kind of pressure he had experienced at work was not difficult for me to imagine, yet the high esteem he was held in by his colleagues suggested that it wasn’t just sadness he’d got from his work, but joy, also. I could understand how that made it all the more unbearable. He had carried on with his job, trying to balance those two things, but Cangrejo’s relegation and Isaguirre’s subsequent return to Spain had been the final straw, breaking the delicate balance he’d been maintaining until then.

‘I think if I’d really been at rock bottom, I’d probably just have become a straightforward recluse,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t that simple, though. My job was really tough, but I’d always manage to get through the challenges it posed. And yet, I had the sense that another thing would always be following close on its heels. As soon as I’d crossed one mountain, another would appear, even higher than the first. I think to a certain extent, I’d accepted that was just the way it was, and I was banking on the fact that Cangrejo would be promoted again to see me through – but then suddenly it looked like they were in an even worse way than I was. And as a fan, of course, there’s literally nothing I can do to influence the outcome of the matches. It was just this the whole time—’ Saying this, Mr Sugai held up a hand and swam his fingers through the air in a wave-like motion, before finally lifting them in a high arc and plunging them down.

‘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.’

Now, it struck me that this feeling wasn’t specific to the profession that Mr Sugai and I shared. 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.

‘And then, after all that, the club I supported was relegated. 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. ‘And you know, living by myself in the forest for months, spending all my time either tracking down food or sleeping really wasn’t that bad, but there was something missing.’ He had swum his fingers through the air and said, ‘Accepting those ups and downs, choosing to take on difficult jobs – that’s what life is about. That was the conclusion I came to.’ This was clearly a thing of his, to illustrate life’s undulations with this wave-like gesture.

‘Well done for all your hard work this year! I’m sending through some new postings, so please take a look,’ it read. The name on the uppermost job vacancy was that of Ms Eriguchi’s mother’s workplace. I sat there looking down at the description, and this time I really did heave a big sigh. Then I swam my fingers through the air, in imitation of Mr Sugai. 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.