Smart Contract Employee V.S. Super Stupid Manager

For you, who loves books, for you in the midst of workplace confusion, for you who dislikes supervisors and colleagues, and for you unsure about the future,

One day in the future, you too might have an encounter like this:

"I work to become happy!"
"And still, I really love books!"

This highly entertaining and page-turning novel follows the life of Kyoko Tanihara, a contract employee at a Tokyo bookstore who finds herself constantly frustrated with her incompetent manager, Takeru Yamamoto, obsessed with self-help books and giving rousing, motivation speeches during staff meetings. Tanihara’s whimsical sarcasm and witty humor punctuate throughout, with the overarching narrative told through a series of interconnected episodes detailing her workplace travails: from her relationships with her colleagues, with particular focus on one who quits on account of an extra-marital affair and another who looks to her as an idealized role model; to a conflict with a well-known novelist invited to do a book signing after releasing a sub-par literary work that the staff find difficult to promote; to a shoplifting incident involving the company CEO; to business negotiations with an overbearing publisher; to various disputes and incidents with disruptive customers; and to Tanihara’s own search for satisfaction and meaning in life and work. Tanihara’s and the reader’s expectations are constantly subverted through the various twists and turns as these incidents gradually come together in the final episode—when Tanihara receives an advance copy of a new work from a friend working at a publisher, she instantly recognizes it as being based on her own life and experiences at the bookstore, and comes to suspect that her manager Yamamoto may in fact be the “masked” author responsible for writing it.