Cassie McCullough

There's no such thing as an easy job.

It's got a very simple premise and structure, which I really liked.

And I think that's because I knew what was going to unfold structurally.

And so then it was just the detail that I was going to get into.

So our central character is a young woman who...

has had some kind of disturbance in her life related to work and it sounds, you know, really quite similar to yours as well, Yumiko.

So she's gone to a work agency and said, I just want a job where I don't have to really do anything at all.

And amazingly, they come up with a job for her and they actually come up with a succession of them.

The first one is with a surveillance agent.

organisation and her job is to sit in front of computer screens and watch the last 12 hours of the target's life and see if anything unusual happens.

Now the guy is, I don't know what he even does, he's a writer but he seems to produce, he's a sort of freelance writer but he's also doing all kinds of things online so it's actually incredibly dull.

He's always eating.

And she finds herself craving the food that he's eating.

Yes.

And cooking the food that he's, or trying to cook the food that he's eating as well.

And so the simple boring task of observing him starts to become a little bit deeper and there's something about human nature that we're invited to look at it in that.

And he watches these stand-up comedy routines when she can't hear the audio.

She can just see him laughing, which is incredibly frustrating.

Yeah, I guess I wonder about you, Yumiko, because what I started to think when I was reading this book, okay, is it that our central character is so...

curious and interesting and richly watching, observing the world, that it's impossible for her to do a very mundane task.