There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

by Kikuko Tsumura

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.