Lie Concierge

Praise for There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job:

“Tsumura’s 21st-century response to Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener.’ [Barton’s translation] encourages us to imagine the voice of Tsumura’s narrator/avatar as both cheeky and self-deprecating, the perfect balance to wage a stealth feminist revolution.” ―NPR

“A revelation that plays out through Tsumura’s sharp prose and biting observations on late capitalism.” ―Time, “Best New Books”

“A quietly engrossing story.” ―Literary Hub, “Favorite Books of the Year”

“Tsumura is adept at capturing tiny reactions, such as the insecurity triggered by an offhand remark, and building them into a picture of the emotional labor of the modern workplace.” ―The New Yorker

“The unsettling genius of Tsumura’s narrator is that despite her string of tedious jobs, she comes closest to describing what a good life may actually look like: spending time searching for chestnuts and breadfruit in the forest, taking long walks around the city, gently drawing out souls who have squirreled themselves away from the world, finding the strange in the everyday.” ―The Atlantic

“Surreal and frequently hilarious.” ―Boston Globe

Kikuko Tsumura is a writer from Osaka, Japan. She is the winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and numerous Japanese literary awards including the Dazai Osamu Prize, Noma Literary Prize, Akutagawa Prize, Oda Sakunosuke Prize, Kawabata Yasunari Literary Prize, Murasaki Shikibu Literary Prize, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro Prize, and a New Artist award for There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job.

Yuki Tejima is a translator from the Japanese whose projects include Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon and How to Hold Someone in Your Heart, Kumi Kimura’s Someone to Watch Over You, and Emi Yagi’s When the Museum Is Closed, among others. Raised in California, she now divides her time between Los Angeles and Tokyo.

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