You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Scan barcode
greyreads's review against another edition
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
spenkevich's review
4.0
‘All I could see was a meaningless arrangement of squiggles and dots, symbols and patterns, running on endlessly. Words are such unstable things.’
There are few better readymade metaphors for the feeling of one’s self as a forgettable cog in a meaningless machine than a factory. Some people may thrive in them, but for those who are quick to reach for terms like ‘kafkaesque’, factories can really take on a sense of absurdity and futility when you watch your life slip by on a conveyor belt of working to exhaustion, sleep and repeat. Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory--translated by David Boyd--dives headfirst into this metaphor and resurfaces dripping in dread and anxiety but with a charmingly surreal story to tell. The novella follows three characters who have each taken a job in The Factory, a massive company in a building the size of a major city that employs much of the region and pays well though nobody is quite certain exactly what they make. As time starts to unravel and the borders between life and work blur, the characters each question if they have lost all sense of purpose in life and if any can be found through work at all. Darkly humor abound, Oyamada’s devilishly surreal fable of factory life is a sharp critique of work culture and the impenetrable bureaucracies that make us all cogs in their machines.
When I was first out of college I took a job in my Uncle’s factory, uprooting myself across the state and into what became my own personal hell. Some people love that life, it wasn’t for me. I was good at it, I worked applying vinyl graphics to signs, but it felt like watching my soul slowly shred itself to pieces in a scream drowned out by the factory noise. Leaving for work at 4 or 5am to work in a windowless building for 9-12hrs often 6 days a week while doing something that in no way interested me.
Needless to say, the absurdities of Oyamada’s Factory really resonated with me. ‘From my second day on the job,’ temp worker Yoshiko Ushiyama says late in the book, ‘I never had to use a single brain cell.’ For someone who likes to be intellectually stimulated, this sort of day-to-day work is torture. My mind would run wild, but felt caged. During the winter I never saw the sun unless we had time to take our lunch, which we usually worked through eating at my station. I felt cut off from the world and if it wasn’t for reading (this was when I joined Goodreads) I would have gone mad (I eventually took a seasonal job 2 and a half years later at a Barnes and Noble just to escape after it was clear I was about to be fired for trying to start a low-key Union).
Oyamada details a fairly sinister work culture here where jobs swallow you up. Leaving because you dislike it is not so simple, as who can leave a stable paycheck for uncertainty in a society where being unemployed or underemployed has a shameful stigma. Employment becomes something that defines you, which many of these characters silently rage against as well as succumb to. The copy editor narrator has lost his job in computers so he must humbly accept work through his girlfriend’s temp agency. His sister finds the girlfriend repulsive, even beneath her brother, but acknowledges that her full-time employment status overrides her grating personality, level of attractiveness and general lack of intelligence (which is, sure, borderline ableist possibly but you get the point). Proximity to secure full-time employment is seen as a successful life above anything else.
The three narrators that make up this story all take turns telling their point of view, which reliably rotates until it suddenly doesn’t. Despite a fairly flat tone of voice between all three (and the sections are not noted which character is speaking), the reader won’t have an issue telling them apart. What is thematically brilliant though, is the creeping realization that the characters aren’t recognized as individuals for their humanity but for their job details. It isn’t until they mention what they do that you are sure which is speaking.
This lack of humanness is pivotal to each characters slow burning anxiety and grief. They should be happy, they have a job in an extremely prestigious factory, but they feel meaningless and constantly question why they are still there.
If work is not what truly defines you, how can you find it when your entire life is poured out into your job as if you are a cloth being wrung dry? Characters such as Yoshio Furufue never even wanted to be there in the first place. He is assigned to study moss in an endless and impossible project with no deadline, no supervisor, and no direction whatsoever. When he tries to make it clear he is a meaningless vessel in the factory, he is told he is trying too hard and not to worry. Another proofreads documents, slowly realizing these papers cover such an absurdly vast array of topics and mediums that he cannot even be sure what the factory does or why. Finally there is Yoshiko who went to school for literature but spends her days destroying documents, which is such an on-the-nose statement that one can’t help but howl in anxious laughter.
Directly opposing the creeping lack of purpose is the way society continues to structure itself around employment. The factory is vast, so vast in fact by the end of the short book it is clear it is larger than most cities (think Charlie Kauffman’s Synecdoche, New York and you are pretty close to Oyamada’s absurdist vision). Like the ‘Washer Lizards’ that live their entire lives behind the wash machines in the factory, living and dying without ever leaving from the very machine that provides them food and protection, workers of society live and die in proximity to their employment. The factory has living quarters, restaurants, small businesses, a downtown of bookstores and coffee shops, a giant river to the ocean and even roads and a highway that run through it. The factory is not just a microcosm of society as a metaphor, it quite literally becomes a microcosm of society. As Oyamada is pretty direct with her humor and metaphors, this doesn’t feel heavy handed but just really works.
There is a sense of [b:Charlie and the Chocolate Factory|6310|Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie Bucket, #1)|Roald Dahl|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309211401l/6310._SY75_.jpg|2765786] to this book with the wondrously imaginative yet sinister factory, though Oyamada throws a few nods to Dahl as well such as the scraggly young boy and his grandfather on the moss hunt (it is called out that all the other children have their parents) who later comes knocking at Furufue’s office. This factory seems to eat the world around it with no purpose beyond growing larger. The book slowly expands into a surrealist hellscape with people hiding in the factory forest trying to pants strangers, strange animals slowly growing in numbers, meaningless jobs droning on, and time starts to morph and become meaningless as well. The book seemingly takes place over at least 15 years, though it starts to be less and less clear when events are taking place in the timeless as it jumps without notice. The factory is swallowing everyone up, eating their sanity first.
While bleak, Oyamada colors this little tale with enough humor and good natured absurdities to keep your spirits high even while watching the characters crumble. She dives right into the heart of the matter quickly and follows its psychological ripples for awhile, which does make the book feel like it may have done better as a succinct short story as the plot sort of plods along, but it still wraps up before it begins to drag. This one really spoke to a dark part of my own work life that, while I prefer to forget about it, is still worth revisiting through the lens of fiction. Funny and plenty of absurdities to go around, The Factory is a fun little book.
3.5/5
‘ I've been living on this planet for more than twenty years, and I still can't talk properly, can't do anything that a machine can't do better.’
There are few better readymade metaphors for the feeling of one’s self as a forgettable cog in a meaningless machine than a factory. Some people may thrive in them, but for those who are quick to reach for terms like ‘kafkaesque’, factories can really take on a sense of absurdity and futility when you watch your life slip by on a conveyor belt of working to exhaustion, sleep and repeat. Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory--translated by David Boyd--dives headfirst into this metaphor and resurfaces dripping in dread and anxiety but with a charmingly surreal story to tell. The novella follows three characters who have each taken a job in The Factory, a massive company in a building the size of a major city that employs much of the region and pays well though nobody is quite certain exactly what they make. As time starts to unravel and the borders between life and work blur, the characters each question if they have lost all sense of purpose in life and if any can be found through work at all. Darkly humor abound, Oyamada’s devilishly surreal fable of factory life is a sharp critique of work culture and the impenetrable bureaucracies that make us all cogs in their machines.
When I was first out of college I took a job in my Uncle’s factory, uprooting myself across the state and into what became my own personal hell. Some people love that life, it wasn’t for me. I was good at it, I worked applying vinyl graphics to signs, but it felt like watching my soul slowly shred itself to pieces in a scream drowned out by the factory noise. Leaving for work at 4 or 5am to work in a windowless building for 9-12hrs often 6 days a week while doing something that in no way interested me.
Needless to say, the absurdities of Oyamada’s Factory really resonated with me. ‘From my second day on the job,’ temp worker Yoshiko Ushiyama says late in the book, ‘I never had to use a single brain cell.’ For someone who likes to be intellectually stimulated, this sort of day-to-day work is torture. My mind would run wild, but felt caged. During the winter I never saw the sun unless we had time to take our lunch, which we usually worked through eating at my station. I felt cut off from the world and if it wasn’t for reading (this was when I joined Goodreads) I would have gone mad (I eventually took a seasonal job 2 and a half years later at a Barnes and Noble just to escape after it was clear I was about to be fired for trying to start a low-key Union).
Oyamada details a fairly sinister work culture here where jobs swallow you up. Leaving because you dislike it is not so simple, as who can leave a stable paycheck for uncertainty in a society where being unemployed or underemployed has a shameful stigma. Employment becomes something that defines you, which many of these characters silently rage against as well as succumb to. The copy editor narrator has lost his job in computers so he must humbly accept work through his girlfriend’s temp agency. His sister finds the girlfriend repulsive, even beneath her brother, but acknowledges that her full-time employment status overrides her grating personality, level of attractiveness and general lack of intelligence (which is, sure, borderline ableist possibly but you get the point). Proximity to secure full-time employment is seen as a successful life above anything else.
The three narrators that make up this story all take turns telling their point of view, which reliably rotates until it suddenly doesn’t. Despite a fairly flat tone of voice between all three (and the sections are not noted which character is speaking), the reader won’t have an issue telling them apart. What is thematically brilliant though, is the creeping realization that the characters aren’t recognized as individuals for their humanity but for their job details. It isn’t until they mention what they do that you are sure which is speaking.
This lack of humanness is pivotal to each characters slow burning anxiety and grief. They should be happy, they have a job in an extremely prestigious factory, but they feel meaningless and constantly question why they are still there.
‘I want to work, and I’m lucky enough to be able to. Of course I’m grateful for that. How could I not be? Except, well, I don’t want to work. I really don’t. Life has nothing to do with work and work has no real bearing on life. I used to think they were connected, but now I can see there’s just no way.’
If work is not what truly defines you, how can you find it when your entire life is poured out into your job as if you are a cloth being wrung dry? Characters such as Yoshio Furufue never even wanted to be there in the first place. He is assigned to study moss in an endless and impossible project with no deadline, no supervisor, and no direction whatsoever. When he tries to make it clear he is a meaningless vessel in the factory, he is told he is trying too hard and not to worry. Another proofreads documents, slowly realizing these papers cover such an absurdly vast array of topics and mediums that he cannot even be sure what the factory does or why. Finally there is Yoshiko who went to school for literature but spends her days destroying documents, which is such an on-the-nose statement that one can’t help but howl in anxious laughter.
Directly opposing the creeping lack of purpose is the way society continues to structure itself around employment. The factory is vast, so vast in fact by the end of the short book it is clear it is larger than most cities (think Charlie Kauffman’s Synecdoche, New York and you are pretty close to Oyamada’s absurdist vision). Like the ‘Washer Lizards’ that live their entire lives behind the wash machines in the factory, living and dying without ever leaving from the very machine that provides them food and protection, workers of society live and die in proximity to their employment. The factory has living quarters, restaurants, small businesses, a downtown of bookstores and coffee shops, a giant river to the ocean and even roads and a highway that run through it. The factory is not just a microcosm of society as a metaphor, it quite literally becomes a microcosm of society. As Oyamada is pretty direct with her humor and metaphors, this doesn’t feel heavy handed but just really works.
There is a sense of [b:Charlie and the Chocolate Factory|6310|Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie Bucket, #1)|Roald Dahl|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309211401l/6310._SY75_.jpg|2765786] to this book with the wondrously imaginative yet sinister factory, though Oyamada throws a few nods to Dahl as well such as the scraggly young boy and his grandfather on the moss hunt (it is called out that all the other children have their parents) who later comes knocking at Furufue’s office. This factory seems to eat the world around it with no purpose beyond growing larger. The book slowly expands into a surrealist hellscape with people hiding in the factory forest trying to pants strangers, strange animals slowly growing in numbers, meaningless jobs droning on, and time starts to morph and become meaningless as well. The book seemingly takes place over at least 15 years, though it starts to be less and less clear when events are taking place in the timeless as it jumps without notice. The factory is swallowing everyone up, eating their sanity first.
While bleak, Oyamada colors this little tale with enough humor and good natured absurdities to keep your spirits high even while watching the characters crumble. She dives right into the heart of the matter quickly and follows its psychological ripples for awhile, which does make the book feel like it may have done better as a succinct short story as the plot sort of plods along, but it still wraps up before it begins to drag. This one really spoke to a dark part of my own work life that, while I prefer to forget about it, is still worth revisiting through the lens of fiction. Funny and plenty of absurdities to go around, The Factory is a fun little book.
3.5/5
‘ I've been living on this planet for more than twenty years, and I still can't talk properly, can't do anything that a machine can't do better.’
alilysong's review
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
i think i'm a pretty easy sell when it comes to satire. the approach can be obvious (which it was here) and it doesn't need to have some profound message (i'm not the kind of reader that usually takes away anything profound from what i'm ready anyways). if you just want to point at something and make fun of it and laugh for the sake of doing just that, i'm usually always game.
this was a quick, weird dystopian and satirical read that wants to take the piss out of capitalist corporate work culture (superr in vogue). i thought the length was perfect and the story beats and dialogue perfectly encapsulates the monotony, dehumanization and disillusionment of this kind of culture - that sense of being a tiny cog in a big soul sucking machine doing completely meaningless tasks for people you couldn't give two shits about. found the writing to be simple but sharp. enjoyed how the author kind of bleeds different scenes into each other - really heightened that sense of the loss of self and of the characters passing through the motions of life with zero agency. i could barely tell the characters apart.
book also had hilariously absurd depictions of inane small talk, elitism, ageism, lookism, consumerisms, all the -isms really
this was a quick, weird dystopian and satirical read that wants to take the piss out of capitalist corporate work culture (superr in vogue). i thought the length was perfect and the story beats and dialogue perfectly encapsulates the monotony, dehumanization and disillusionment of this kind of culture - that sense of being a tiny cog in a big soul sucking machine doing completely meaningless tasks for people you couldn't give two shits about. found the writing to be simple but sharp. enjoyed how the author kind of bleeds different scenes into each other - really heightened that sense of the loss of self and of the characters passing through the motions of life with zero agency. i could barely tell the characters apart.
book also had hilariously absurd depictions of inane small talk, elitism, ageism, lookism, consumerisms, all the -isms really
replaceableheads's review
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Observant of the invasive tendrils of corporate "culture" in personal lives, the environment, etc.
laurafd's review
challenging
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
katybug25's review
challenging
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.0
jessarratt's review
mysterious
reflective
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
I can't stop thinking about this book. No huge revelations, just really great insight into how it feels working for a huge (monstrous) company in a capitalist society (hellscape.)
erinlcrane's review
3.0
What I liked:
1) Weird, surreal, absurd elements. Bizarre stuff happens and you just gotta roll with it.
2) Clearly some themes of soul-crushing corporate life, being a drone, nonsensical corporate decisions. It had some laugh out loud moments in a… this is so sad it’s funny kind of way.
What I didn’t like:
1) Why oh why did the chapters not begin with a heading that told me which POV I was reading? It’s all first person, they all work at the factory. I didn’t enjoy having to try to remember where we were in the narrator cycle.
It also included major scene changes with no break in the text, so it would take me a minute to realize a conversation had ended and I was in a whole different place.
You could argue those choices had a purpose in the story to unsettle you, but it was too frustrating to be worth it to me.
2) Ultimately, I was dissatisfied with how this came together. The themes were interesting, the setting had weird stuff. But not much was done with it. I like a plotless book, but then there has to be a lot of character development or something instead. This felt like it just never fully dove into any of the content.
1) Weird, surreal, absurd elements. Bizarre stuff happens and you just gotta roll with it.
2) Clearly some themes of soul-crushing corporate life, being a drone, nonsensical corporate decisions. It had some laugh out loud moments in a… this is so sad it’s funny kind of way.
What I didn’t like:
1) Why oh why did the chapters not begin with a heading that told me which POV I was reading? It’s all first person, they all work at the factory. I didn’t enjoy having to try to remember where we were in the narrator cycle.
It also included major scene changes with no break in the text, so it would take me a minute to realize a conversation had ended and I was in a whole different place.
You could argue those choices had a purpose in the story to unsettle you, but it was too frustrating to be worth it to me.
2) Ultimately, I was dissatisfied with how this came together. The themes were interesting, the setting had weird stuff. But not much was done with it. I like a plotless book, but then there has to be a lot of character development or something instead. This felt like it just never fully dove into any of the content.