What is going on in "The Factory"?

The factory in Hiroko Oyamada's novel The Factory is immense. It has apartment complexes and housing that looks “like a real suburban development full of tidy two-story homes,” supermarkets, a bowling alley, karaoke, a fishing center, hotel, “more restaurants than you can count” not including employee cafeterias, a post office, bank, travel agency, a couple of book stores, an optometrist, a barber, an electronics store, a gas station, a museum (with works by factory artists and employees, but still worth a look), its own bus and taxi companies. 

The factory is much bigger than the average town. It has its own mountains, forests, and river. It has its own Shinto shrine and priest. “All we’re missing now,” says the employee who is acting as a guide for a new employee, “is a graveyard. I guess we don’t have a temple, either.”

For all this we never learn what the factory manufactures, what it produces.

The book follows three employees. Yoshiko Ushiyama, after going through five jobs in four years, is hired by the factory and feels fortunate to be taken on as a part-timer. In college, she focused on the Japanese language and how people communicate, particularly the use of language in print media. She’s hired by the Print Services department as part of the Staff Support team. Her job is to shred documents. That’s it. Shred bins full of documents three or four days a week

Yoshio Furufue, a graduate research assistant in bryology, the study of mosses and liverworts, is hired to determine how to grow moss on the factory’s roofs. “We have a few different organizations taking care of our trees, flowers, roads, and streetlights,” says the PR guy explaining the job. “Green-roofing has been a real blind spot, thought, and that’s why HQ finally decided to step in and deal with it on their own.”

The third employee, a former systems engineer for a small company, is hired as a proof reader. Packets arrived daily and “our job was to take whatever we found in the packet—documents of various types and formats—and proof them. In some files, there were additional materials, like manuscripts or newspaper articles. If that was the case, we were supposed to check the document against them for accuracy.”

Aside from evoking the mind-numbing routine of these jobs—although Furufue lives in factory housing, studies the local mosses, and determines they will not grow on the factory’s roofs—Oyamada captures the office bureaucracy, the plant tour, the after-hours drinking, a hunt for the Forest Pantser—a middle-aged man “who ran around the forest trying to pull the pants of men and women of all ages.”

And the story begins to slide from the realistic—or recognizable, if exaggerated—world into something stranger. Grayback Coypu, a rodent, “similar to the spiny rat”; Washer Lizards, “the order of scaly reptiles”; and Factory Slags, “a member of the order Pelecaniformes, related to the cormorant” begin to appear. Mutations provoked by the factory? And what does the factory do to the humans who work within it?

Hiroko Oyamada, who was born in Hiroshima in 1983, based the novel on her experiences working as a temp for an automaker’s subsidiary. The Factory won the Shincho Prize for New Writers, and The Hole, her next novel, won the Akutagawa Prize. 

David Boyd’s translation from the original Japanese is clear and fluent. The publisher or book designer did the book no favors by limiting the number of paragraphs. Because Amazon Japan does not have a “Look Inside the Book” feature, I cannot tell if this is how the original appears. In the New Directions edition, paragraphs go on for pages, one quote following another like a line of ants. It saves space, and it may have been an art director’s idea to have the reader drag herself through the story the way the characters have to drag themselves through their days at work, but it make hard reading.

Nevertheless, for anyone interested in contemporary Japanese literature, it’s worth the effort.