Review of Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory
Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd
The Factory
New Directions
October 2019
ISBN: 978-0811228855
128 Pages
reviewed by Daniel LoPilato
A temp worker feeds reams of documents to a paper shredder. A scientist tracks moss in a forest. A proofreader corrects indecipherable corporate jargon. These are the three workers whose “jobs” Hiroko Oyamada imagines in The Factory, her debut novel and her first to be published in English. The result is a delightful, surreal, disorienting book about industrial capitalism’s unpredictable effects and what it means to be human.
The factory at the novel’s center functions as an enormous self-contained organism, and a horizon the reader is never allowed to gaze beyond. Countless people work there but none of them know what the factory produces. It sits inside a city surrounded by mountains no one can see. It contains entire forests, and a river runs through it. Subtly observed details about the factory and its surroundings seem ordinary at first, but as the novel progresses, the workers lose their bearings. Things begin to feel off-kilter.
Oyamada’s prose, translated by David Boyd, drifts across perspectives in kaleidoscopic fashion, examining moments when the workers’ identities overlap with each other and with their hyper- industrialized environment. They are pleased, puzzled, and shocked to be working at the factory, often all at once. Their presence there is constantly subject to renegotiation, and when their status as a worker is disputed or contradicted, they react as if their status as a person is violated as well.
The bureaucratic labyrinth separating each department is so elaborate that none of them know whom their work benefits, let alone what purpose it serves. Scenes change without warning and time shifts in peculiar ways. Pages go by without paragraph breaks, and, fair warning, this book is short on dialogue tags. Aesthetically, it experiments with the monotonous, and it makes few attempts to distinguish its characters from one another or to make extraordinary happenings seem anything other than utterly normal.
When the workers labor, their minds wander. They’re concerned less about being productive than they are about looking productive. Yoshiko Ushiyama, the paper shredder, muses about the factory: “It was all so big, and I was a part of it—it had a space for me, a need for me… 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.” This passage could serve as the novel’s thesis. What happens, Oyamada asks, when work becomes make-work?
If this sounds like realism—many of us, after all, feel exactly the same way about our day jobs—you should know that The Factory is one-part Kafka, one-part Ovid, and one-part Office Space. Workers discover creatures like the “factory shag” and the “washer lizard,” biologically distinct animals adapted to life among industrial waste. Elsewhere in the factory, office supplies temporarily transform into birds. One notorious character, the Forest Pantser, haunts the forest by pulling down the trousers of unsuspecting hikers. I still wonder if he is even human.
While it’s easy to read this narrative as a metaphor for the relationship between life and work, Oyamada’s novel succeeds in a much more satisfying and complex way. It imagines the factory as an environmental, spiritual, and industrial feedback loop whose effects are unpredictable and ambiguous. The circulation of images and themes throughout the novel—manuscripts, for instance, tend to disappear from one narrative thread only to reappear without explanation in another—turns the factory into a sort of ecosystem. In an era of maximized productivity and accelerated ecological collapse, The Factory challenges readers to trace the interconnected ways humanity, nature, and machines mutually transform one another.
Dostoyevsky once speculated that “if it were desired to reduce a man to nothing… it would only be necessary to give to his work a character of complete uselessness, even to absurdity.” The Factory agrees, with an emphasis on the absurd. Yet while Dostoyevsky views meaningless work as a discrete punishment, a type of deliberate violence done against a person, Oyamada seems to view it as a collective fate. By the time I finished this book, I began to wonder if Oyamada proposes the factory as a critique of the world we’ve created or as a facsimile of it. If we already live in the factory—a place without boundaries or signs—would we even recognize it?
It finally struck me that The Factory’s reluctance to cohere around a universal image is perhaps its key strength. Instead of rehearsing what we already know about the material state of the global working class—long hours, stagnant wages, few protections—or the rise of the professional managerial class, it seeks to make visible the outlines of the intangible: worker alienation, the mystification of capital, and the innumerable ways our work makes and unmakes who we are.
Daniel LoPilato is a fiction writer from Atlanta. His work has appeared in print and online in the Indiana Review, American Short Fiction, and the Tusk.
Hiroko Oyamada, born in Hiroshima in 1983, won the Shincho Prize for New Writers for The Factory, which was drawn from her experiences working as a temp for an automaker’s subsidiary. Her novel The Hole won the Akutagawa Prize.
David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated stories by Genichiro Takahashi, Masatsugu Ono and Toh EnJoe, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat won the 2017/2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. With Sam Bett, he is cotranslating the novels of Mieko Kawakami.