The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada—

Anyone who has ever worked in a job which involved repetitive, meaningless tasks, will recognise the impression created in The Factory that workers are just minute cogs in a senseless machine. It’s a novella which paints an uncomfortable portrait about the absurdity and meaningless nature of the world of work.

Oyamada’s debut English-language narrative focuses on three people who land jobs at a vast industrial factory somewhere in Japan. No-one is exactly sure what this company makes (it might have something to do with paper/printing) but jobs there are highly valued — the company pay wells and has excellent facilities for their workers. Their site is about the size of a major city with multiple restaurants, its own bus service and housing for some of the employees.

One of the new recruits is a scientist specialising in the study of mosses who is employed to lead a a ‘green roofing’ project. But he’s given no guidance about where to focus his efforts nor any specific objectives. In the absence of any clear direction, he ends up leading school children and parents on walks to identify and gather samples of different species. schedule, and the substance of his supposed job remains a mystery to him.

Yoshiko Ushiyama joins the factory as part of a team within the Print Services Branch Office. Twice a day, every day, twelve containers of documents arrive at the Shredding Section where she and her colleagues push them through the shredder until it’s time to change out of her company-assigned uniform and go home.

The third recruit is her brother who is assigned a slightly more interesting job as a proofreader. On his first day he’s confronted by packets of documents chest high. Corporate profiles, recipes, booklets for children, manuals, customer letters — they all need checking for grammar and spelling and proofing against manuscripts or newspaper articles.

It’s so boring that after a while he finds himself nodding off to sleep at his desk. Not that anyone notices because all the workers are separated by dividers so they can’t see each other or chat during the workday.

He ends up questioning the value of the work he’s been tasked to perform. A co-worker told him early on:

We proof everything and leave notes. So you do that, send it out, wait a while and eventually the same thing comes back. Anotehr version of the same document. sometimes though, its even worse than before.It just makes you ask yourself, what have I been doing. Someone somewhere is probably doing something with our edits but we don’t even know who.

And in time, questions about his work lead to broader questions about the nature of the company which has employed him.

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 realised that I had no idea.

All three characters ask questions which never get answered. The more they ask, the less they get to know about this enormous enterprise. As the factory takes over more of their life, they begin to lose the sense of themselves as individuals and their connection to life..

The more my thoughts wander the harder it gets—everything feels so disconnected. Me and my work, me and the factory, me and society. There’s always something in the way, something thin as paper. It’s like we’re touching, but we’re not. What am I doing here?

The Factory is told in three alternating first-person narratives that segue from one to another without warning. It’s not clear whether the narratives are happening simultaneously or sequentially and if so, whether the narrators are speaking months even years apart for time is a slippery concept in this novel.

The Factory is an unsettling novel. Elements of it border on the absurd — one character walks over a bridge quicker its believed humanly possible, another sees men working high up on the bridge yet they have no ropes or wires tethering them to anything. And that’s before we even talk about the black birds that keep gathering in vast numbers along the river. No-one knows what they are or why they behave so strangely. This is never fully explained but there’s a suggestion right at the end of the novel that is really unnerving. Not that I’m going to reveal what that is of course.