Yuzuki believes that books about the struggle of insecure work, including Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job (translated by Barton), opened doors to Western readers. “My generation, born in the 1970s and 1980s, is called the ‘employment ice age’ generation,” she says. “They graduated in the 1990s straight into the post-bubble stagnation, and continue to struggle with un- and underemployment. This is something younger Western readers can relate to, and we’ve been writing about it for years.” {read}