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“At my desk,” says Millie, thirty-year-old perpetual temp and narrator of Halle Butler’s The New Me, “I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.”
We are all Millie - or, at least, we have been at some point. Trapped in a job with no apparent purpose or prospects, earning just enough to survive on, struggling to find any meaning or joy in a corporate existence. Millie has bounced from job to job all of her working life: “I think I’m drawn to temp work for the slight atmospheric changes. The new offices and coworkers provide a nice illusion of variety. Like how people switch out their cats’ wet food from Chicken and Liver to Sea Bass, but in the end, it’s all just flavored anus.”
She has been working as a receptionist at a furniture showroom for a couple of weeks when the book begins. There, she spends her days watching a phone that never rings, half-listening to the tedious small talk of her colleagues, and conducting pointless internet searches. In short, each new work day is “another fucking waking nightmare.” Then, a permanent vacancy opens at the company she is temping at, and Millie decides to grab the opportunity with both hands. She allows herself to envisage a different life. One of glorious stability and predictability: a gym membership (although she doesn’t enjoy exercise) and a monthly book club meet (although she hasn’t read in years). When she gets the permanent job, she’ll stop getting black-out drunk mid-week, she will be “calm, cool, self-assured, self-reliant,” she will be reborn. The new her. A neoliberal dream. All the while, she continues to quietly despise the job she is now aspiring to commit to on a permanent basis.
The unnamed narrator of There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, translated by Polly Barton, is also a temp. However, unlike Butler’s Millie, she hasn’t always been. After graduating from university, she worked for the same firm for a decade, but was forced to leave once the role “sucked up every scrap of energy…until there was not a shred left.” Recovering from burnout and stress, she turned to a recruitment agency in search of “a job that was practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not.” In short, a mindless job. An easy job. Turns out, that’s something that isn’t so easy to come by. Each of the book’s five chapters sees the narrator sign a new temporary contract and encounter a new set of temporary problems. And it’s not just jobs which lack permanence in Tsumura’s portrait of modern Japan. Homes, relationships and even families are shown to be temporary and transient. The supporting cast of characters - which changes with each new temping role - agonise endlessly about the infidelities and fallouts which threaten the precarious foundations of their lives.
For Keiko Furukura, the narrator of Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, work is a sanctuary. At 36 years old, Keiko’s disinterest in marriage and children has made her somewhat of a social oddity. Only at the konbini (convenience store) does she feel accepted: “I am one of those cogs, going round and round,” she says proudly. “I have become a functioning part of the world.” The validation offered to Keiko by her place of work prompts her to commit to her role entirely. At heart, she is more convenience store woman than she is Keiko - which is just the way she likes it.
Such is the significance of the convenience store in her life that she has subsumed it, made it a part of her and she a part of it. “For breakfast I eat convenience store bread, for lunch I eat convenience store rice balls with something from the hot-food cabinet, and after work I’m often so tired I just buy something from the store and take it home for dinner,” she says. “When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.” It’s not just the consumables that form an intrinsic link between Keiko and her place of work. In order to become a better ‘cog’, she takes on the personality traits of her workmates, morphing herself into the most palatable colleague she can be. She reflects: “I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues such as Sasaki, who left six months ago, and Okasaki, who was our supervisor until a year ago.” Much like the narrator of There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job, Keiko’s social circle is made up exclusively of a revolving door of colleagues, many of whom seem to disappear almost as soon as they arrive.
When Keiko’s circumstances change and she is required to leave the convenience store, she feels a sense of loss akin to grief. The world beyond the store’s white walls and fluorescent lighting is strange and confusing to her. “I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren’t as complicated as this,” she dreams. “Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality— all simply store workers.” Without her work, Keiko fears she is nothing and nobody.
In Exit Management by Naomi Booth, Lauren’s identity is also forged around her work. As the title suggests, she works in the division of Human Resources charged with ‘employee offboarding.’ Essentially, she helps people fire other people. It’s unclear exactly where she works, but the men (they are all men) she helps ‘let go’ are traders, so presumably her role is within an investment bank or finance firm. Due to the high-pressure, high-reward nature of their roles, the men are not keen to leave. Lauren is charged with ensuring they do so, quietly and with minimal fuss.
Lauren is desperate to rise through the ranks, from the “hunted and sun-starved” working classes she was born into, and up toward the glamorous lifestyles of her superiors, who spend their lunch breaks dining out on blood sausage like capitalist vampires, joking about who they’re “getting rid of this afternoon.” She wants to get away from the smell of desperation that emanates from the new temp (a Molly this time, not a Millie) who talks constantly, nervously, narrating her every action aloud: “S drive, yep? HR department, yep? Costing codes, yep?” The oppressive culture of workplace anxiety is palpable, pushing Lauren to work ever harder in an attempt to transcend her humble beginnings.
However, no matter how hard she works, Lauren still barely makes enough money to rent a broom cupboard in London. She is shown around by increasingly irritable letting agents - “men who are good at sales and sexual coercion” - through a plethora of unsuitable abodes. Flats with “an extremely strong smell of skunk, top-notes of semen” and “plaster cool and slightly clammy to the touch like amphibious flesh.” The ghastliness of rentier capitalism is exposed, in all its bleakness and black mould. Then, Lauren meets Callum, a young man working in an equally ghoulish job: servicing empty luxury apartments to be rented out short term to the ultra-rich. Their relationship - and the resulting events, which I won’t spoil here - didn’t quite work for me, but the comments Booth makes about work, renting and neoliberalism are needle sharp.
The nihilist abandon of the women in The New Me and There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job may seem a world away from the tireless work ethic of Keiko and Lauren in Convenience Store Woman and Exit Management, but really, these are all just stories of women ruled by work. Eating prepackaged food at their desks, sound-tracked by the inane conversations of their colleagues, stuck between aspiring for promotion and simply handing their lanyards in at the front desk and never coming back. Whether dining out on the company card or filling out the hundredth application form, in each of these narratives the world of work is shown to be a daunting and disquieting place.
To Do: A Reading List
The New Me by Halle Butler
There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, trans. Polly Barton
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori
Exit Management by Naomi Booth