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Hiroko Oyamada (author), David Boyd (translator), The Factory, New Directions, 2019. 128 pgs.
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Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory weaves together the perspectives of three narrators whose lives intersect within the titular workplace. Yet, to call it a “workplace” is something of a misnomer, as its employees remain largely uncertain about what they do or why they do it. Take our most developed protagonist, Yoshiko Ushiyama, who is ushered into a part-time role as a member of the factory’s so-called Shredder Squad.
Her duties involve little more than destroying documents, affording her ample mental wandering space—and us a welcome entry point into her consciousness. Critically aware of the factory’s influence and its omnipresence in everyone’s lives, she looks down on her coworkers but finds enough substance in their interactions to gnaw on.
Meanwhile, her brother, a temp editor in the Document Division, contends with the effects of narcolepsy. To stay awake, he muses on the instability of words and their fluidity within the annals of communication. His realisation that the documents he revises invariably return in worse shape than before underscores the futility of his efforts—his attempts at correction as flimsy as the paper they are printed on. The same applies to his desire for human connection, which dissipates when he arrives at work one day to find partitions placed between desks. What initially seems an imposition soon becomes a comfort, reflecting his disinterest in socialising.
Yoshiko, by contrast, erects no physical barriers—only those she crafts within. She spins a translucent comfort from the few threads available to her. A dinner outing with her brother and his girlfriend highlights this internal detachment; her disdain for the girlfriend’s condescension reminds her of the vacuum that is her life, seeding her resentment for those who force her to confront it. Tellingly, she finds more humanity in inanimate objects than in her flesh-and-blood colleagues. “We have more shredders than employees,” she observes. “So we can switch from one machine to another with ease. The first time I did, it almost felt like I was choosing my own partner, like I was an active member of society.”
The third perspective belongs to Yoshio Furufue, a former researcher now employed as the factory’s resident bryologist. His sole task is to catalogue the moss on the factory’s sprawling grounds—an area that, we learn during his orientation, encompasses nearly 100 cafeterias, restaurants, a museum, apartment complexes, a bowling alley, a hotel, a post office, a bank, bookstores, electronics stores, a petrol station, a shrine with a priest, and more.
While it is up to the reader to discover the fates of this unlikely trio, they are neither the novel’s most compelling characters nor its central focus. If anything, we learn more about animals than about people in Oyamada’s surreal world. The Factory is more invested in its non-human inhabitants, with its longest and most developed passages dedicated to A Study of Factory Fauna—a report written by the grandson of Yoshiko’s supervisor, which conveniently lands on her brother’s desk. In it, we encounter the greyback coypu (a river-dwelling rodent), the washer lizard (a reptile that subsists on lint and laundromat scraps), and the factory shag (a black bird related to the cormorant), all described in exhaustive detail. The shags, in particular, permeate the novel—ubiquitous and eerily present. Yoshiko, for one, notices them from her very first day, convinced of their omnipresence even in the most mundane moments: “Out of the corner of my eye,” she reflects, “I thought I saw one of the smaller women in Print Services holding a black bird by its wings, but when I looked again it was just a toner cartridge.”
Despite the temptation to read all of this as a satire on workplace alienation, Oyamada sidesteps easy classification. Instead, she breathes life into the factory itself, rendering it less a machine of bureaucracy than a thrumming, evolving organism. People are not merely cogs in a grand system but rather organs in a larger body. Even when Furufue complains of stagnation, his boss dismisses his concerns with an unsettling response: “A result-oriented approach simply doesn’t make sense in Japan.” This moment underscores one of the novel’s core themes—that the delineation between the “meaningful” and the “meaningless” is arbitrary, a self-fulfilling illusion. The novel asserts that everything we do is meaningless.
This leads to an implicit question: Who are we without our work, regardless of whether we choose it or it is chosen for us? The closest we come to an answer emerges when Yoshiko finishes early one day and wanders the factory grounds. “I thought I’d been giving it everything I had,” she muses, “but what I thought was my everything had no real value.” In that moment, she is the child she once was, visiting the factory on a school field trip, mesmerised by its sheer scale. We, too, feel a tug from the past—a reminder of a time when the fantasy of getting paid to do nothing seemed like an ideal existence. Oyamada’s brilliance lies in her refusal to romanticise that illusion. She takes us to its logical endpoint, revealing the desolation of a life spent in perpetual inertia. Once the things we create crumble, she suggests, we are left with nothing but empty pages—destined, like so many before them, for the shredder.
How to cite: Grillo, Tyran. “A Senseless Menagerie: Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2 Mar. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/03/02/the-factory.
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Tyran Grillo holds a PhD in Japanese Literature from Cornell University and is an avid reader, translator, music critic, and photographer. His latest book, Fuzzy Traumas: Animals and Errors in Contemporary Japanese Literature (2024, Cornell East Asia Series), explores complex interspecies relationships through a posthumanist lens. Although he has left academia to pursue a full-time career as a professional editor, he remains deeply engaged with his fields of interest through lived experience and creative practice.