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In ‘The Factory,’ a Mysterious Company Manufactures Fear

By Parul Sehgal

• Dec. 17, 2019
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In Samuel Beckett’s classic play “Happy Days,” a woman sits on stage, buried up to her neck in a heap of sand, keeping up a patter of cheerful conversation. At one point, she pauses and surveys her situation.

“Ah earth,” she says. “You old extinguisher.”

The three central characters in Hiroko Oyamada’s enigmatic novel “The Factory” also watch themselves being slowly and systematically buried alive, but by another great extinguisher of the self: work. They are new hires at a large corporation called the Factory. What the company creates remains a mystery; its only discernible product appears to be the dread and wild confusion it induces among its employees.

Yoshio Furufue, an expert in moss, was recruited to create grass roofing for the facility, and is startled to learn that he must handle the project alone, without colleagues, training or a supervisor. He is encouraged, however, to take all the time he needs — months, even years. Yoshiko Ushiyama, meanwhile, finds herself at the factory after quitting her last five jobs, and is recruited into “document destruction.” For seven and a half hours a day she feeds papers to a shredder. “From my second day on the job, barring the occasional jam, I never had to use a single brain cell,” she realizes in wonderment. Her brother also joins the organization, as a proofreader of nonsensical texts that induce in him a kind of narcolepsy. He spends much of the day (and the novel) furtively napping at his desk.

The voices, and attitudes, of the three are identical: puzzled, passive and melancholy. Only a sudden pronoun shift or small detail indicates a shift in perspective. It’s an alertness Oyamada inculcates in her reader. She is fond of jump cuts and scenes that dissolve mid-paragraph and flow into the next without so much as a line break. A pleasant vertigo sets in. Objects have a way of suddenly appearing in the hands of characters. Faces become increasingly vivid and grotesque. Nothing feels fixed; everything in the book might be a hallucination. Food is the only reality and comfort. Characters glut themselves constantly, reaching often, it seems, for organ meat — liver, tongues, tripe. There’s a sense of watching them consume themselves.

David Boyd’s translation is smooth and plain-spoken, if occasionally marred by a jarring American phrase (“we’re talking big leagues here”). It captures the aridity and somnolence of life at the factory, which has metastasized to the size of a town, boasting its own museums, karaoke bars, supermarkets, apartments, bookstores. Everything, Yoshio is told, but a graveyard.

This is the setup of the book, and little changes where the characters are concerned, save one or two fantastical flourishes. Every night, Yoshiko goes to sleep crooning “die, die, die” to herself. Every morning, she wakes hoping a natural disaster has consumed the world. Then she gets up, gets dressed and goes to work with the deadening knowledge that there is nothing she can do that a machine cannot do better. Nature, however, has begun to behave strangely. Something uncontrollable has been set in motion. Why have dark-colored birds begun to gather at the site in such numbers? They double in number from year to year. They stare directly at the factory.

Oyamada has been awarded Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize, and “The Factory” is the first book in her acclaimed body of work to be translated into English. Her debut novel, published when she was 20, it bears some of the qualities of youth itself: It is truthful, indignant, evasive and, very much, still in progress.

The proofreader and moss expert are thinly, indifferently drawn. Only Yoshiko, with her harsh, unpredictable edge, has the charisma of a fully imagined character. Subsidiary plot points and characters are summoned up only to be forgotten. The story and central ideas still need time to ripen and connect; they remain merely suggestive, slightly unsure, a little garbled, like Yoshiko’s own reasoning. “I want to work,” she thinks. “Except, well, I don’t want to work. I really don’t. Life has nothing to do with work and work has no real bearing on life. I used to think they were connected, but now I can see there’s just no way.”

Much has been made of Oyamada’s debt to Kafka, and of “The Factory” as an indictment of corporate life. There are passing remarks about automation and the routine indignities of office life, but the book feels too diffuse for satire, too lonely and questioning. The conventions of the novel, or the character, seem less interesting to Oyamada than mapping a particular emotional state: the intersection of numbness and fear that is induced by the company and all it seems to represent about precarity, alienation, climate change (as signified by the invasions of strange species). The questions the characters finally ask of themselves — Why am I here? What role do I play? — have nothing to do with their jobs and everything, we learn, to do with the real notion of work at hand.

Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal .

The Factory By Hiroko Oyamada Translated by David Boyd 116 pages. New Directions. $13.95, paper.

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THE FACTORY

by Hiroko Oyamada ; translated by David Boyd ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 2019

Tedium, meaninglessness, and alienation abound in this urgent but unsubtle fiction about the Japanese precariat.

In Oyamada’s cautionary English-language debut, three recent hires at an inscrutable industrial factory find themselves bewildered by their strange new world.

“In times like these, a job’s a job,” Yoshiko thinks before signing on as a contractor who will shred documents all day in the basement of the eponymous factory. Her brother has taken a temp position proofreading the factory’s paperwork, a task so dizzying and incomprehensible that he can’t stop falling asleep at his desk. The factory itself is staggeringly large and byzantine; its bureaucracy is predictably opaque; and strange new species are mutating within its walls. This phenomenon we observe mostly through Furufue, a moss scientist hired to green-roof the factory complex, who, given neither direction nor deadline, is left to languish in an unstructured sinecure. But as the narration judders disorientingly across time and multiple perspectives, we realize that neither characters nor plot are the point of this book; rather, Oyamada is interested in crafting an atmosphere—somewhere between mind-numbingly mundane and mind-bendingly surreal—to explore and illuminate the depersonalizing nature of work in contemporary Japan. This results in a kind of lobotomized Kafkaesque quality: The novella’s protagonists are so disaffected that they don’t have any depth or agency; and after a century-plus of modernity and its discontents, the satire comes across as tame rather than trenchant. What’s new and interesting here is the ecological aspect of the critique: Oyamada deftly ties together the plights of human and nature, both becoming unrecognizable in an inflexible industrial economy. But with so few moments of intimacy or optimism, the novella is ultimately a document of deadpan despair, resigned to exaggerate the absurdities of the present rather than try to change them.

Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-8112-2885-5

Page Count: 128

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019

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BOOK REVIEW

by Hiroko Oyamada ; translated by David Boyd

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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by Robert Harris

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

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The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada BOOK REVIEW

By: Author Willow Heath

Posted on Last updated: 18th April 2024

Franz Kafka never knew fame or even real recognition in his lifetime, but his legacy has grown through the decades since his death. It seems that more and more books published this century have been inspired by his themes, his dark comedic tone, his philosophies, and even his bleak characters and settings.

This is certainly proof of the state of the working world, and what late-stage capitalism, bureaucracy, and political corruption is doing to our exhausted modern society – soon to be, as Kafka all but predicted, a withered husk.

The Factory , by Japanese author Hiroko Oyamada, goes beyond the Kafkaesque and reads more as an ode to Kafka himself. It feels, at times, like it could even be the novel he never wrote. And, in true Kafka fashion, it feels incomplete.

The Factory follows three protagonists who all work at an unspecified factory in Japan. The factory seems to make and distribute all manner of things and consumables, and its mass spans miles and miles. A character remarks how the factory “really has it all, doesn’t it?

Apartment complexes, supermarkets, a bowling alley, karaoke … It’s like a real town. It is. Much bigger than your average town, really … We’ve got our own shrine, with a priest and everything. All we’re missing now is a graveyard.”

And so, the factory has successfully become an inescapable place where humans live and work. Soon enough, they will die and be buried there. No longer can they separate home from work. No longer can they escape work. Work provides everything for them. The metaphor here is clear; it’s clever, it’s frightening, it’s Kafkaesque. But it also doesn’t really lead anywhere.

It’s clear from almost the beginning that The Factory exists as a Kafkaesque allegory for the inescapability of modern work life, especially in Japan where suicide rates are high and death by overwork (karoshi) is common. And there are many moments dotted across this very short novel which hit like beestings.

They’re sharp, harsh, upsetting – they act as wakeup calls to this awful reality of ours. But they’re not consistent, and that’s one of the reasons that this book ultimately comes up short. It’s a book of grand ideas and a vital message about the enveloping, devouring world of ultimately pointless drone work, but it doesn’t seem to have any greater message for us than that.

It seems, when The Factory is at its most frail, that it is simply saying: Work is like a prison, isn’t it? Life’s too short to spend all day working! What’s the point of it all? We’re all just robots; slaves to the system! But that’s all; nothing more. And the thing is that we all already know this. We all feel it. But so what? What, exactly, is the larger point here? There doesn’t seem to be one.

All of this is not to say that The Factory isn’t worth reading. In fact, I had a great time reading it. It certainly delivered much of the same bleak humour and societal commentary that Kafka himself invented. But simply emulating Kafka isn’t enough.

This book, in sticking so close to its inspiration, devises nothing new to say. Oyamada is not being a Kafka for the 21 st Century, which she absolutely could be, but rather someone who wants us all to see how relevant Kafka still is. And that’s true, but we can still read Kafka.

“I couldn’t see the end of the bridge, ahead or behind me. How far had I come? How long had I been walking? Looking over the side, there was nothing but water. Is this the ocean?”

That being said, there is one new spin that Oyamada makes, and it’s through the best of the three protagonists: Furufue. This young man (or, at least, he’s young at the beginning) is a tragicomic character who ends up, quite inexplicably, working at the factory straight out of college – in fact it seems that he is yanked out and volunteered up to the factory.

His job is to coat the factory’s rooves in moss, being a bryologist (student of moss) as he is. This greening of the rooves is not supervised. Furufue has no team, no boss, nobody to help him. He stipulates that he is unqualifies and cannot do it alone – we’ve already established that the factory is more a city than a single workplace. And yet, his employer is not bothered.

He has a laissez faire attitude about the whole thing, explaining that Furufue does not need to rush, will be paid a very fair monthly salary, and should approach the job as he sees fit. Furufue has no real method, no drive, no endgame except to finish greening the rooves – an impossible solo task.

The metaphor here is obvious and is executed quite flawlessly. Before he knows it, Furufue will be an old man with nothing to show for his career: a career he did not even ask for and does not fully understand. And yet he will have been paid a very good wage for it, thanks to his respectable college degree and the misunderstanding that he is any kind of expert in his field. If this isn’t peak salaryman culture, I don’t know what is.

Aside from Furufue, however, the other two characters are relatively underutilised. Ushiyama is a young woman who has flitted between jobs before arriving at the factory. She is directionless, antsy, and flighty. And yet she is given a job thanks to that same laissez faire attitude that got Furufue to his odd position.

The supervisor who deals with both of these protagonists — Goto — is the embodiment of Japan’s poor productivity. Japan is famous for this, in fact. Despite excruciating and maddeningly long work hours that destroy personal and family lives, productivity in Japan is painfully low because nobody has time to sleep, relax, and recharge.

Goto and the factory itself demonstrate that. The factory is a flytrap for its workers, and Goto encourages no productivity whatsoever. Ushiyama, however, goes nowhere as a character. Her defining moment is in a monologue that, in many ways, epitomises the themes at play in the book:

“In the morning, I could barely wake up. I wasn’t ready for work … My head wasn’t in it. Even if it wasn’t, so what? My job couldn’t be any simpler … Everything feels so disconnected. Me and my work, me and the factory, me and society … What am I doing here? I’ve been living on this planet for more than twenty years, and I still … can’t do anything that a machine can’t do better.”

The Factory exists as a curious bridge between the Kafkaesque and something new. It pays great homage to Kafka, is largely successful in its efforts, and it almost has something new to say about our current, abominable situation. But not quite.

The setting of this book is fantastic. It’s creepy, unsettling, unnerving in all the right ways. But it is populated by characters who are mostly ill-defined, bar one. It might have worked better as a short story with the focus entirely on Furufue. But as it exists here, The Factory feels like a poorly connected book with some fantastic ideas that don’t quite fuse together coherently.

Oyamada certainly understands Kafka, and she certainly has big and bold things to say about the toxicity of Japanese salaryman culture. But it almost feels as though she doesn’t quite find the courage to say everything she wants to say.

The Factory may lead to a future magnum opus that exposes the withered heart at the centre of corporate culture but, as a work in its own right, The Factory is a fun read with some wonderful, if only half-baked, ideas.

If you enjoyed this review, you would love Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

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The Factory — a nightmarish Japanese satire on working lives

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Mika Ross-Southall

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Strange, unsettling things happen at the outset of Hiroko Oyamada’s debut novel. Time slips by indefinitely. Animals develop odd traits and grow in number at an alarming rate. Workers turn up for their jobs in an isolated factory somewhere in Japan, but it’s unclear what the company based there actually does .

The complex is vast, with apartments, supermarkets, restaurants, bookshops, karaoke bars, a museum and a bank. “All we’re missing now is a graveyard,” one worker says to another, just after warning him that “you never know who’s watching”.

We meet three narrators, newly employed in different departments. Ushiyama, a liberal arts graduate, is a contract worker in the basement, mindlessly feeding documents into shredders all day. She lives with her older brother — irons his shirts, makes his lunch — and hasn’t held on to a job for more than six months.

Furufue, meanwhile, is a junior moss researcher, hired to create grass roofing for the facility’s buildings without any supervision, colleagues or training. No one seems to care that he’s underqualified or that the project isn’t progressing. Each time he tries to talk to HQ, he is met with smiles and told to keep going at his own pace.

A Kafka-esque atmosphere haunts the story: inscrutable bureaucracy, bizarre obstacles and a sense of alienation

The unnamed third narrator proofreads nonsensical printouts. “I have no idea where they go or who receives them”, he thinks, “I have no clue if I’m doing my job correctly.” He spends most of the time trying not to fall asleep at his desk.

The Factory  was first published in Japan in 2010 when Oyamada was in her twenties. A threatening, Kafka-esque atmosphere haunts this story: inscrutable bureaucracy, bizarre obstacles, impassive characters and a sense of alienation reminiscent of Kōbō Abe or Yōko Ogawa. This is captivating, disquieting prose, deftly captured in David Boyd’s translation.

Black birds clump together on the edge of a nearby river and are “slick as oil, like if you wrung one by the neck you’d get black ink all over your hands”. In one memorable scene, Furufue watches his former university adviser, supposedly on a diet, eating a huge breakfast. He shovels down stir-fry, rice and shredded cabbage drenched with Thousand Island dressing, then sticks a pickled plum “in his mouth, sucked off the flesh, cracked the stone with his molars, and tongued free the innermost kernel before spitting it back onto his plate”.

Into this relentless tension, Oyamada weaves flashes of dark humour. The factory borders a dark forest where a middle-aged man called the “Forest Fairy Pantser” runs around trying to pull off people’s trousers. “Considering how tight security is around here,” Furufue thinks, “it’s hard to imagine the culprit sneaking in from outside. It’s extremely likely that the guy’s on payroll.”

When Ushiyama decides to explore the factory complex on an afternoon off, her manager explains that the north and south zones “couldn’t feel more different. Everything over there is more, uh, physical. The buildings here are so metaphysical”.

Scenes shift suddenly in the middle of paragraphs and changes in voice are indicated only by subtle details. Some characters and plots are introduced, then go nowhere or are contradicted later on. The effect is dreamlike and dizzying — if a little frustrating at times.

Still, this short, powerful book poses important questions about the terrifying futility of corporate jobs and our role in the world. “Life has nothing to do with work and work has no real bearing on life”, Ushiyama says. Still, the next morning she punches in.

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd, Granta £12.99, 128 pages

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Megan Evershed

Wrote labour.

The Factory, Hiroko Oyamada, New Directions, October 2019, £9.99 (paperback)

Picture a large office, staffed with hundreds of employees. Each worker has their own cubicle, placed in long rows throughout the space to make a corporate honeycomb; their heads are quietly buried in their work. They’re next to each other, but not touching or talking. Their corporate workspaces embody the paradox of the cubicle: a part of something, but also completely isolated.

This imagined scene is emblematic of Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory , which was originally published in Japan in 2013, and has been issued in a new English translation with New Directions. The novella chronicles the spectre of corporate culture and its effects through the rotational lens of three characters: Furufue, Yoshiko, and Yoshiko’s brother. All three work in the same Amazon-like conglomerate in Japan, which is known enigmatically as ‘The Factory’.

The factory is all-encompassing: within its limits are multiple restaurants, a barber, a post office, a travel agency, and a shrine with a priest. The company is its own universe, and every family who lives in the adjacent city is involved: Yoshiko, who works as a shredder, tells us that ‘everyone has at least one family member working for the factory’.

The boundaries between family and society, as well as between work life and personal life, are blurred by the integration of the workplace into the surrounding area. For Furufue, who works as a moss specialist, life inside and outside of the factory are practically superimposed onto each other: he lives in an apartment on the company premises. These living arrangements—although not disagreeable to him—are thrust upon him by Goto, the factory’s middle manager. ‘The idea of moving here didn’t bother me,’ Furufue tells us. ‘It was just happening so quickly and without my input, without my knowledge.’

Knowledge, or its absence, is a central theme in Oyamada’s novel. Furufue is brought on to perform a job he’s not qualified for and isn’t confident he’ll be able to accomplish. His uncertainty about his role at the factory mirrors Yoshiko’s confusion about her own position there. ‘Everything feels so disconnected,’ she says. ‘Me and my work, me and the factory, me and society…What am I doing here?’

Furufue and Yoshiko’s perplexity about their place within the company is related to the factory’s ambiguous purpose. No one really knows what the factory makes, or what it does. We vaguely know that it creates ‘products,’ but aren’t clear on what kinds. These questions are never answered, and are both alienating for the reader and fitting for the novella’s project. I found myself frustrated by the vagueness (a symptom of living with the internet 24/7, and being able to find straightforward answers with a quick Google search). Soon, however, I started to acclimatise to this shadowy atmosphere, where knowledge isn’t a given.

Instead of answering questions about the factory’s products or its purpose. Oyamada is far more interested in capturing the meaningless feeling of capitalist wage labor. In the novel, nothing escapes the crushing effect of routinization—even language becomes a kind of automated labour. One of the characters works in proofreading, and another works in shredding documents. The correction and the destruction of language are, therefore, both made rote. Consequently, the factory management controls the relationship between its employees and the written word. This is made even more obvious when they install dividers between workstations in the proofreader’s department to ‘increase productivity’.

Even in her own relationship with language, Oyamada reproduces the feeling of rote labour through her storytelling choices. She accomplishes this by standardising the narrative voices at the beginning of the book so that, at first, the characters appear dramatically indistinct (I was deep into the second chapter before I realized a different character was speaking, and then repeated the experience in the third chapter). The uniformity of the characters speaks to the way rote labour can depersonalise the worker — as Yoshiko’s brother says: ‘I’m doing this work that literally anyone could do, as if nothing I’d ever done in my life even mattered.’ By standardizing her characters’ voices, Oyamada subordinates ease of reading. She disorients the reader, unsettles them. This risk ultimately pays off: the narrative’s experimentalism is well-rendered, and adds a compelling layer to the reading experience.

Despite Oyamada’s somewhat mundane, depersonalised style, the characters’ storylines are discernible as independent plots — much like the partitions between desks in the proofreading department. When, later in the novel, the clean divisions begin to warp, and Yoshiko and Furufue report their interactions from their respective viewpoints in a disorienting sequence of consecutive chapters, it’s as if the walls of a cubicle are being torn down. There’s finally real connection between the characters, even if it’s presented in jagged and confusing ways.

This narrative switch-up fits in with the rest of the novel’s spirit. Shifts are the guiding energy of The Factory, both in the sense that the characters work waged shifts, but also because the novel shifts temporally with them. Years dissolve over the course of a sentence. Near the end of the novel, Yoshiko asks Furufue how long he has been working at the factory – it’s been fifteen years. This information is startling. Up until this conversation, there had barely been an indication of the passage of time. As a worker, he has been dispossessed of his years, and the passage of fifteen of them barely registers. In her toying with time, Oyamada presents the idea that an employee’s time (and, therefore, a large chunk of their life) is not their own. The destabilizing way she delivers this realization is proportionate to how this information should shock and perturb us. In our own capitalist context, our time is not our own; it is our employer’s. For me, this was one of the most affecting moments in the book.

Oyamada, whose own time temping for an automaker’s subsidiary inspired this novella, is interested in the way that the ordinary devolves into the bizarre. Her second novel, The Hole , is about a woman who quits her job, moves away, falls into a hole, and then experiences mysterious occurrences. The surreal quickly seeps into the everyday so that the transformation is almost imperceptible. In the same way that Oyamada’s chronotopic interest in narrative fiction speaks to a deeper idea about the principle form of waged labour, her interest in rumour, in exploring the goings-on in the factory – and the creatures inexplicably drawn to it – also represent abiding truths about the nature of corporate culture.

The unsettling presence of the factory creatures and the inappropriate antics of the Forrest Pantser (a man who goes around pulling people’s trousers down) serve as vehicles to represent familiar corporate concepts: constant internal surveillance, cover-ups to save face, and the fascism of usefulness (to borrow J Bryan Lowder’s phrase). The symbiotic relationship between the status quo and the corporation is maintained at all costs, a maxim that holds true for corporate dramas — both fictional and real.

The Factory , therefore, appears to depict a strange reality, but really points out how similar Oyamada’s surreal world is to our own. This makes it an ideal novel for our moment. It’s a workplace novella that feels more pointed and, ironically, more true to life than other contemporary examples, like Halle Butler’s dark office satire The New Me .

In fact, the novella actually reminded me of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You , a code-switching state-of-the-nation film, which skewers office life satirically, with some troubling, dystopian turns. In the same way that Riley’s movie asks us to interrogate how our workplaces are dependent on surreal labor conditions, Oyamada pushes us to do the same in The Factory . In both Riley’s film and Oyamada’s novella, the conclusion, which involves people turning into animals, points to the ideological underpinnings of both of their projects: capitalist labour dehumanises workers.

At its core, The Factory is a meditation on what it means to perform rote labour under capitalism. The takeaways are just as disturbing as birds that spend their days obsessively gazing at a factory. You want them to fly away, but they’re seemingly unable, or unwilling, to do so — they’re chained to the ground, to a desk, or, perhaps even, to a cubicle.

Words by Megan Evershed.

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The Factory by Oyamada Hiroko

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B : solid little novel of the anonymous modern mega-urban life- and work-place

See our review for fuller assessment.

   From the Reviews : "A threatening, Kafka-esque atmosphere haunts this story: inscrutable bureaucracy, bizarre obstacles, impassive characters and a sense of alienation reminiscent of Kōbō Abe or Yōko Ogawa. This is captivating, disquieting prose, deftly captured in David Boyd’s translation. (...) Into this relentless tension, Oyamada weaves flashes of dark humour. (...) Some characters and plots are introduced, then go nowhere or are contradicted later on. The effect is dreamlike and dizzying — if a little frustrating at times. Still, this short, powerful book poses important questions about the terrifying futility of corporate jobs and our role in the world." - Mika Ross-Southall, Financial Times "The blurb for this brilliantly strange novella compares it to Kafka and Beckett, but Magnus Mills meets Hitchcock would be more accurate. (...) There’s a blend of the banal and the outrageous that we recognise from a certain strain of modern Japanese literature, and the delivery is exquisite" - John Self, The Guardian "Very little happens in The Factory , and Oyamada�s tendency to plot through the drifting accumulation of odd encounters -- strolls, moss hunts, co-worker dinners, the vanishing or sudden appearance of colleagues -- would have been more effective in a longer work. The characters, possibly by design, are regrettably indistinct. But the narcotized vision of an endlessly accommodating company town feels prescient in the era of "smart cities" chartered by Alphabet, Amazon, or Mohammed bin Salman" - Julian Lucas, Harper's "One thing you will feel is effort. The book puts the reader to work, pushing us out of complacent passivity into active critical thinking, thanks in part to a superb translation by David Boyd. (...) By the time I finished reading, Oyamada�s text had transmuted into something more than just a difficult read or a critique of modern society. The metaphor expands within itself into a kind of feedback loop: How do humans construct meaning ? How does nature act or react to our constructions ? What invests work with meaning ?" - Kris Kosaka, The Japan Times "The voices, and attitudes, of the three are identical: puzzled, passive and melancholy. Only a sudden pronoun shift or small detail indicates a shift in perspective. It�s an alertness Oyamada inculcates in her reader. (...) David Boyd�s translation is smooth and plain-spoken, if occasionally marred by a jarring American phrase (.....) Her debut novel, published when she was 20, it bears some of the qualities of youth itself: It is truthful, indignant, evasive and, very much, still in progress." - Parul Sehgal, the New York Times "Oyamada�s strangely chilling novella (.....) The purpose of the factory is as bewildering as the tasks of the people who spend their lives there." - Alison McCulloch, the New York Times Book Review "Soon, time and the characters� understanding of life beyond the factory begin to fog, and perhaps Oyamada�s greatest achievement is transferring this disorientation to the reader. (...) This nonpareil novel will leave readers reeling and beguiled." - Gabe Habash, Publishers Weekly "One of the mysteries that keeps the reader hooked is that of the factory itself: a nameless, giant industrial complex set somewhere in modern-day provincial Japan. (...) The final twist might not come as a surprise, but it is surprisingly eerie, and stays with you long after you finish reading." - Eri Hotta, Times Literary Supplement Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

Corporate profiles, operating manuals, booklets for children, recipes, texts on everything from science to history ... Who wrote this stuff ? For what audience ? To what end ? Why does it need to be proofread at all ? If these are all factory documents, what the hell is the factory ? What's it making ? I thought I knew before, but once I started working here I realized I had no idea. What kind of a factory is this ?

My job couldn't be any simpler. (Thinking about it, it's really insane that the factory pays me as much as they do. Why not automate the process ?) The more my thoughts wander the harder it gets -- everything feels so disconnected. Me an my work, me and the factory, me and society.

- M.A.Orthofer , 24 October 2019

About the Author :

       Japanese author Oyamada Hiroko (小山田浩子) was born in 1983.

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Review: The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post might be affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

The Japanese author Hiroko Oyamada has the uncanny skill to turn you into one of the main characters of the book. When reading The Factory you feel like they feel: there is no escaping The Factory .

The Factory Synopsis

In an unnamed Japanese city, three seemingly normal and unrelated characters find work at a sprawling industrial factory. They each focus intently on their specific jobs: one studies moss, one shreds paper, and the other proofreads incomprehensible documents. Life in the factory has its own logic and momentum, and, eventually, the factory slowly expands and begins to take over everything, enveloping these poor workers. The very margins of reality seem to be dissolving: all forms of life capriciously evolve, strange creatures begin to appear… After a while—it could be weeks or years—the workers don’t even have the ability to ask themselves: where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? Told in three alternating first-person narratives,  The Factory  casts a vivid—if sometimes surreal—portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of modern life. With hints of Kafka and unexpected moments of creeping humor, Hiroko Oyamada is one of the boldest writers of her generation.

Book review

“The far end of the corridor had an ominous sound to it, like the place was reserved for dead-end employees.” Also known as our three main characters. One of the Ushiyama siblings is a proof reader of irrelevant texts and the other a shredder of papers that aren’t important. “Seriously, though, I love my job. Shredding really unleashes the artist in me.” Very funny, Yoshiko. The moss specialist Furufue is the odd one out being tasked with green-roofing the factory, a job that seems meaningful and important at first. When? Whenever… take your time.

Work is a prison you can’t escape from, even though it is part of the world but not of you. “I thought I’d been giving it everything I had, but what I thought was my everything had no real value.” When you can’t do anything that a machine can’t do better it makes no sense to get out of bed in the morning for a salary you feel you don’t deserve. They keep saying they have to count their blessings, because it isn’t physical labor. Yet they don’t see that the mental drain of what they do is worse for them. They keep thinking that they could have ended up much worse, but the reader is not fooled. Could you live a meaningless life? Are you doing it?

You can feel the hopelessness of their existence which is even more pronounced whenever the cheerful (on the outside) Goto makes an appearance. It hurts to see the contrast. “But that didn’t change the fact that Goto was apparently totally useless.” Poor Goto. The onboarding Goto gives our three main characters is terrible. Has anyone seen the Korean TV Drama Misaeng ? Let’s do better in real life. 

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada turns me into one of the main characters wasting their time by making me read about Graybacks and Washer Lizards and Factory Shags… I don’t care. I understand the meaning behind the animals; the author clearly put some symbolism into the story, but it was too weak to impress me. It left me wanting for something stronger, something with more meaning, fulfilling my own need for a meaningful past-time. Kudos to the author for making the reader feel what the characters feel, though, but I don’t want to feel bored while reading. And I certainly don’t want to feel miserable on a Sunday evening right before the new work week starts. 

As for the meaning of the story: the black birds symbolize office workers in general and the three animals our three main characters. They never wander far from where they reside and work. In the north zone where the ‘important’ employees work the trees are green with life year-round, but in the south zone they are yellow and dying, if not bare and dead. From document creation to proofreading to shredding, their jobs cover a paper’s lifecycle. And then it starts all over again, forever and ever. Time is not of importance in the book, nor is the order of affairs. 

“It was all so big, and I was a part of it – it had a space for me, a need for me.” Just live in the factory. The Factory is life.

Translated from Japanese by David Boyd.

Interested?

You can get your copy of  The Factory from Amazon .

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