The Factory
Hiroko Oyamada, Trans. by David Boyd
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Factory
Hiroko Oyamada, Trans. by David Boyd
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory gives the lie to the idea that the Americans and the Japanese are so different when it comes to our relationship with our jobs. It’s a workplace satire that will make a lot of sense to American readers.
... enigmatic.
... at first glance it could be off-putting. Lines of thought change without warning. Character dialogue proceeds without the usual paragraph breaks. And when you least expect it, the scene concludes and you find yourself in another scene, mid-action, sometimes mid-conversation. The Factory is disorienting; reading it makes one feel trapped in a maze, where every turn leads down another endless corridor of blank walls until those walls give and you’re suddenly somewhere else. The metaphor is apt for a satire about workplace bureaucracy.
In a wry, deadpan style, [Oyamada] distills the profound unease of a world where companies grow more and more imperceptibly controlling even as they promise workers less. 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; in plans for Neom, a futuristic city-state,.
There is more than meets the eye in this seemingly mundane narrative.
It’s all remarkably disquieting and unnerving. Like Kafka, Oyamada is also concerned about how institutions—in her case corporate monoliths such as Amazon or Wal-Mart—gradually strip the individual of their identity, their sense of purpose, through the tedium of pointless, repetitive jobs.
Ms. Oyamada toys with some interesting narrative effects.
In casting the most mundane workplace details and interactions as abstruse and dreamlike, Oyamada makes work feel inescapable.
... a cool, self-controlled presentation tinged with a creeping surrealism.
Oyamada can certainly write.
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.
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. Tedium, meaninglessness, and alienation abound in this urgent but unsubtle fiction about the Japanese precariat..