π RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
π RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS
Click HERE to read all entries in Cha on Hiroko Oyamada.
Hiroko Oyamada (author), David Boyd (translator), The Factory, New Directions, 2019. 128 pgs.
The cover is what first drew me in. A plastic binβnot the kind used at home, but one youβd see in a workplace. Itβs dark green, like fir trees or moss. It stands against a featureless pink void. White smoke seeps out from its lid. The white smoke and sickly pink background combine to turn an object so ordinary into something mysterious, maybe even unsettling. Which is exactly the atmosphere that Hiroko Oyamadaβs novella The Factory, translated by David Boyd, evokes.
Thereβs an uncomfortable familiarity about workplace settings. You can spend most of your working week in an office, practically living at your desk, but itβs never a home, never a place to fully relax. Watch yourself, stay composed, make a good impression. You are involved in something larger than yourself but you never know the bigger picture.
Rieko Matsuura describes The Factory as β[a] proletarian novella for todayβs worldβ. What sets it apart from older fiction about factory work? Well, most of the characters focused on here are in administration, doing desk or environmental work. Those doing the heavier lifting and other manual labour are conspicuously absent. Compare this novella to Hayama Yoshiki’s short story from the 1920s Letter Found in a Cement Barrell (translated by Ivan Morris), Yokomitsu Riichiβs 1930s short story Machine (translated by Edward Seidensticker), or even to Meiji-period author Natsume Sosekiβs novel The Miner (translated by Jay Rubin). All take the reader into the bowels of earlier forms of industrial work, less streamlined than the contemporary kind found here.
Personally, I prefer the focus on surface, administrative work. And itβs something you see a lot of in contemporary Japanese literature. The Factory is in some ways a condensed, darker companion to such recent novels as Aoko Matsudaβs Where the Wild Ladies Are or Kikuko Tsumuraβs There Is No Such Thing as an Easy Job, both translated by Polly Barton.
The Factory conveys a sense of static motion. The factory keeps going, pushed on, not just by its workers and owners, but also by nature. Events are strange but repetitive. There is something clinical about Oyamadaβs prose. It reminds me of Tatsuaki Ishiguroβs Biogenesis (translated by Brian Watson and James Balzer), especially in its descriptions of creatures living in the factory environment, while its industrial dreaminess is similar to that of KΕbΕ Abe.
One curious detail is the lack of paragraph breaks. There are paragraphs, but very few have gaps, and there are usually none between dialogue. The sharp perspective switches are disorienting, and hard to follow. I have read two other novellas by OyamadaβThe Hole and Weasels in the Attic. Like The Factory, they are translated by David Boyd. My copies of The Factory and The Hole are both published by New Directions, and both are typeset in this unusual way. My copy of Weasels in the Attic is published by Granta and includes those breaks. So, does this stylistic choice come from the publisher, rather than the author or translator? Whatever the case, I like it.
While the individual sentences are lucid and composed, the lack of gaps allows for a blurring of the sharp prose. Different points of view become entangled, and the ambiguity is enhanced. Birds, moss, the colours grey and green, a mysterious figure who pulls down victimsβ trousers in the forest, paper shredders, strange animals of ambiguous existenceβ¦ What does this all mean? How do these details coalesce?
The factory of the title is its own world, some sort of enclosed ecosystem. The reader is given glimpses of its inner workings, but only glimpses. This novella reads like excerpts from a longer unpublished work. There is always some bigger picture out of reach, and no true sense of resolution. Its story continues without us.
How to cite: McBride, Jane. βSome Sort of Enclosed System: Hiroko Oyamadaβs The Factory.β Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 19 Mar. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/03/19/factory.
Jane McBride is a PhD student at the University of Galway in Ireland. Her research is on liminality in urban and digital contexts. Other topics of interest include East Asian literature, electronic and experimental music, digital humanities, comics, and Lewis Carroll. Jane is also a proofreader and artist. Her music and illustrations can be found online under the name Jane Eksie. [All contributions by Jane McBride.]
Cha 