Hiroko Oyamada

The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada--one of the most powerfully strange young voices in Japan

The Factory

The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada—one of the most powerfully strange young voices in Japan 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.

Great writing, terrible ending lol, almost thought the last pages had been removed lol

Jeffery Tay

Eva Ströberg

Hiroko Oyamada - The Factory
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⭐️⭐️⭐️
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The factory is a world on its own, it has everything you need, and it is a society in itself. Three different people were hired in the factory. One to shred papers, one to proofread documents and the last to hunt moss and has a department only for himself. Their lives revolved around the factory and the tasks they did in the factory
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As many Japanese stories, this book has that surrealism around it, unfortunately there is something about the book that doesn’t really get into my liking. The factory is a symbolism, but I can’t really get past that veil. So it’s a good reading and I’m sure it’s so much more but I just can’t get thru that
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#hirokooyadama #japaneseauthor #booksbooksbooks #bookstagram #currentlyreading #2024readingchallenge #2024reads

I keep thinking about the dryer lizards 👀

Madi

amira

Katie Chua

spectacularly eerie. i loved how weird it was: how time passed in this book, the general absurdity of office life. it really felt so resonant ... oh the days when i sat at a desk, making my own work to do to pretend i was doing something, going to the bathroom every 45 minutes to stay awake and splash water, chewing minty gum, walking around the office .... great use of absurdism to highlight the incredible bat shit banality work under capitalism is

baelgia

It's unnerving that the titular factory, whose reach into their employee's lives have probably been exaggerated for the purposes of storytelling, so accurately mirrors real-life "factories." They have "nearly a hundred cafeterias" and "a decent number of restaurants, too." Not to mention "a museum, warehouses, and product test sites." What does the factory produce? We never find out. 

(view spoiler)[ The book is told through the perspectives of three characters. Furufue toils day after day on his moss samples — to what end? Fifteen years down the line, he realizes he's done nothing with his life. The work he's originally hired to do has been outsourced. Now, they want him to lead two moss-hunts a year. Still, he enjoys a comfortable life. He lives in company subsidized housing, eats company subsidized food, doesn't have expensive hobbies — or any hobby, it seems like — to spend his disposable income on. He's mostly content with the status quo and would probably continue to work for the company until he retires. Furufue is the white-collared and more privileged grayback coypu with a lifespan (what I've understood as a class of workers' retention period) of 10-40 years.

Yoshiko, who literally turns into a bird at the end of the book, is a factory shag who can't fly very far and never strays from "their home at the mouth of the factory" even though it resides right "where ocean water and freshwater come into contact." I've taken that to mean that she has options. The exit is right there! But she won't leave. It doesn't matter that she sees no meaning in the work she does and laments that she can't do anything better than a machine. At this point, she's worked five different jobs and presumably hated all of them, and it's starting to shape up like a her problem. Interpreting it more literally, she also doesn't venture out of her designated North Zone until she's forced into a day off and decides to take her manager's suggestion to visit the bridge. The section unique to the factory crags in the factory fauna guidebook "Where Did The Birds Come From? Where Are They Going?" echoes Yoshiko's own musings — which also happens to be my favorite passage from the book — on the bridge: "How far had I come? How long had I been walking? Is this the ocean? Where's the shore?"

That leaves Yoshiko's brother, Ushiyama (whose first name I'm failing to dig up), as the washer lizard. The environment they're born into is competitive and dangerous. Only the strong can lay their eggs in prime locations, significantly increasing their offsprings' chance of survival. The young are left to fend for themselves from the get-go, contributing to their high-mortality rate. Although Ushiyama's stakes aren't life or death, he's certainly drawn the shorter stick. Furufue makes it a point to try out the different dining options around campus. Yoshiko gets yakiniku with her team, possibly on a somewhat regular basis. But Ushiyama's workplace is so far removed from the rest of them that the nearest cafeteria is farther than a fifteen-minute walk. On his first day, he scavenges "two energy bars and a bottle of tea" from the nearest convenience store, beaten by the lunchtime rush. Except for one of them, his coworkers don't seem to care about him. There's no sense of camaraderie. Fueled by capitalism, The Factory puts up isolating walls around their desks in the hopes of increasing productivity. He itches to leave, to be a grayback coypu elsewhere, and maybe his desire is understandable.  (hide spoiler)]

Those are broad strokes for sure, but I appreciate the way Oyamada has captured and classified non-positive sentiments surrounding work. It may not be the most enjoyable read. It's confusing and could do with more paragraph breaks but I think the formatting and structure play into the downward spiral of the characters' entanglement with The Factory. I found The Factory relatable and even (absurdly/nihilistically) funny at turns. If you've struggled with a 9 to 5 you might relate to a lot of the book as well. It stayed with me for a few days and compelled all this word vomit. Soooo, yeah, 5 stars!

If there are any actual analyses of the book out there you've seen/written, please please please drop a link! I looked but couldn't find any, and I'd love to consume a big-brained dissection of this big-brained dissection deserving book.

Also, here's the aforementioned fav passage. It's hidden behind spoiler tags because it's a meaty boy: (view spoiler)[I want to work, and I'm lucky to be able to. Of course I'm grateful for that. How could I not be? 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. If I tried explaining that to Itsumi, she'd say something like she did at yakiniku, about how you have to keep on fighting. But that's not the point. I've worked my whole life, and it's never been a fight, not at all. It's always been stranger than that, harder to grasp. It's not even something inside of me. It's out there, out in the world. How could I ever control that? I thought I'd been giving it everything I had, but what I thought was my everything had no real value. Just look at the way I am now. That's proof. I don't want to work. I don't, but what else am I doing with my life? [...] Whatever—even if it doesn't bring me any pleasure, at least I'm making some sort of living. I've been fortunate. Beyond blessed. I have to accept that. So what if there's something in the way? I'm sure work is like that for everyone. I can't always act like a spoiled child. (hide spoiler)]

Jason Porterfield

This is a breathless and twisty story of three workers in a massive factory complex, their baffling jobs, pointlessness and cormorants.

Jennifer

I don't think I retain enough from this to write a full review. While I appreciated the underlying themes (with the factory playing both a central and figurative role) in the novel, I found the writing difficult to follow through electronically. Luckily this is really short otherwise I'd had given up midway.

The Factory

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