The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada

While The Factory shares many similarities with The Hole, it lacked the eerie atmosphere that made the latter into such a beguiling read. The Factory switches between three 1st povs, without specifying who is narrating (we usually can guess by the job they do). They all work at ‘the factory, an industrial factory located in an unnamed city that size-wise is close to Disneyland. The factory has a large influence on the city’s inhabitants, kids and adults alike go on field trips there in order to learn more about its inner-workings, and parents are keen for their children to have careers there. One of our narrators is employed to study moss, another shreds paper, and the third is a proofreader. Throughout the course of this novel, the author highlights the nonsensical rules and tasks that characterize modern working environments. Many of the conversations they have with their colleagues verge on the absurd, and much of what happens in their daily working lives will strike us as peculiar. Two years ago I was a temp worker at this company that processed donations and lottery tickets for charities and it made for a very strange working experience. They had bizarre regulations and often gave us temp workers the most random jobs.
This is not the first book that I’ve read that satirizes the gig economy. The Factory wasn’t quite as inventive and engaging as say Temporary. Also, the use of multiple narrators resulted in a less focused storyline. Whether this was intentional or not, I found myself wishing for a more introspective read. The characters populating this book are half-formed caricatures that didn’t quite succeed in capturing a certain type of person/worker. Still, The Factory does read like a contemporary Kafkaesque tale. There is an interview scene very early on in the narrative that felt really spot-on.
While this wasn’t as quite a memorable read as The Hole it does make for a weird and fairly humorous read.

my rating: ★★★☆☆

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