The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada: A Kafkaesque Look at Corporate Life

Rating: 3/5 ⭐️

I found the title on Goodreads last year while browsing for something interesting to add to a list, just scrolling through covers, and then it was sitting on my Apple Books for a long time, waiting, until I finally decided to give it a go. It starts off normal enough, just a story about work, but then the ground shifts, the narrator changes abruptly, catches me off guard, and I am suddenly someone else, it is disorienting until I learn what to look for, until I know which voice I am currently holding. I eased into it. I started to understand the tasks. The work is so low key, interesting on some level, just shredding paper all day, the machine eating the sheets, or verifying useless documents that no one will ever read, or studying moss—that one takes the cake, the moss. There is no supervision. No one comes to critique the work. You just do it, mindlessly, in this place that is an ecosystem unto itself, with houses and restaurants and buses and laundry and everything you might possibly need, and I started daydreaming as I read, thinking it would be great to have a job like that, a guaranteed income for doing basically nothing, no stress, just the hum of the air conditioner, and I could use the time to do something else, I could finally clear my reading list, or play games, or watch a movie, cheating the system to get paid to exist while I enjoy the finer things in life, while the time passes without me noticing that I have already swiped to the last page and the story has stopped, leaving me sitting here, wondering where the afternoon went.