Cogs in the machine

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Factory is a surreal, existentialist novel. You might call it magical realism. It's what you might get if Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Angela Carter were living in contemporary times and collaborated on a project together. The novel follows three people who work at a sprawling factory in Japan. No one knows what the factory actually produces, and none of the three main characters seem to understand their job or how it fits into the broader scheme.

Hiroko Oyamada rotates point of view between the three, and at times it's difficult to know who's talking because their voices all sound similar, down to the side remarks they make about others. At first, I thought this similarity might be a fault of the translation by David Boyd, but I came to think that Oyamada did this intentionally to emphasize the lack of individuality of the factory workers. There are strange phenomena that appear to be real, like an ever-growing mass of unidentifiable black birds living outside the factory, and others that may or may not be, like lizards that have adapted to live behind the machines in the factory's two cleaning facilities, subsisting on bugs, dust, and dryer lint.

Boundaries are thin in this novel. It's sometimes hard to know who's talking because of the lack of paragraph breaks in the dialogue. The breakdown of boundaries continues as the novel progresses--between timelines, between characters, between reality and the fanciful.

I found the theme of the factory as a dehumanizing force a bit facile, and without more uniquely drawn characters, it's hard to feel too invested in them. The end was also abrupt. But I'm a sucker for existentialist novels, and The Factory is a creative and thought-provoking read.



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