What can graduates learn from ‘The Factory’ by Hiroko Oyamada

“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”

“Or maybe this was just how overworked middle managers looked, devoid of life and spirit”

image by freepik

As students, the lingering cloud of future job insecurity is ever pouring. We see the door to desirable employment as open only to those with pre-existing ‘connections’ and the enterprising minority who have focused their energies towards manufacturing a practical appearance of ‘employability’. These qualities have allowed them to swim past others who remain static within the pool of unemployed graduates. For those left, we are to rely on our (mostly) irrelevant experience and degree modules that brag unique ‘transferable skills’ to propel us beyond our graduate peers. We are then obliged to forage through a thousand jobs, apply to a hundred, and dream for one. This process, whilst being exhausting, forces us to abandon what we would like to do for the apparent reality of what we have to do. Thereby work, for the majority, becomes something we wish to separate from ourselves, it begins to feel foreign and bizarre – a concept wittingly explored by Oyamada in her short novella, The Factory.

The Factory follows three new employees’ progressively strange relationship with work and their disparate work environments. Throughout the book we are mysteriously towed along by their experiences and interactions within the boundaries of an unidentified factory in an eery (yet equally comical) fashion. In the initial chapters we hear three distinct voices, each with their own history and personality, one is a proofreader, another is a paper shredder, and the third is a moss inspector leading a green-roofing project. As the story progresses, the distinctive lines between personalities are blurred and identifying the narrator becomes a tedious endeavour. Accompanying these narrative developments, is the nagging reminder that the compromises we continue to make to satisfy the conditions of employers, shape us in the image of repressive neoliberal archetypes. Archetypes that evolved from rewarded self-interest and the passive- aggressiveness exclusive to job competition. Oyamada constructs this atmosphere according to a very modern variant of work, a domain inoperably diseased by what can only be diagnosed as psychological insecurity and alienation. 

Oyamada’s inquiry into alienation is expressed in a variety of forms. These can be simplified as follows: alienation from colleagues and authority, alienation from the workplace, and most importantly alienation from self. Beginning with alienation from colleagues, workers at the factory are rarely named and interactions are infrequent and, at best, uninspiring. Yoshiko (the paper shredder) perfectly characterises this with each human encounter riddled with cynicism and crippling apprehension – always overly conscious of the mal-intent and potential duplicity of strangers. This scent of indifference pervades the factory’s atmosphere, driven by a toxicity of job insecurity, whereby other employees stand as competitors in the game of free-market employment. The characters hereafter become consumed by auditing, of self and others, always critical of their own work and that which is produced by others.  This resembles an anxious employee conscience, almost Freudian in style, by which conscience, originally operated by an abstract inner-parent, becomes redundant and morality is instead resolved by a sort of anonymous corporate daddy whose punishment is always unemployment. 

Almost caged within the factory, characters relate to their workplace as a kind of voluntary prison. With no real developments in their own understanding of their role or purpose at the factory, each person finds themselves stuck between the convenience of factory life and the overarching belief that there is no alternative. Every worker is relegated to their respective stations within the factory, where they are confined more by the fear of over-stepping the line than any real deliberated boundaries. Both the reader and characters are then united in their strange epistemic separation from the rest of the factory, which resembles a metropolis – acting to obscure the division between work and life. So, no matter how noble our efforts, this intentionally constructed facade of ‘work-life balance’ that we all indulge in can only be maintained for so long before we realise that work is not something so easily divorced from our psyche.

Finally, Oyamada delineates all these passive methods of alienation as steadily working together to strip us of our personhood. Oyamada proceeds to partner this general self-detachment with echoes of trepidation, introducing an unsettling presence of birds, or factory shags, that infiltrate the factory. Described as being flightless and misplaced, these birds amass in a weirdly unnatural manner on the factory perimeters. It is not until the end of the story where their purpose is made clear, when Yokishima absurdly takes the shape of one of these birds. A metamorphosis that represents the freakish and long-overdue complete loss of character. Yokishima has stayed working for so long, in a job that she despises, that she becomes interwoven into the fabric of the factory. She – like many of us – becomes consumed by what is required of her and thereafter relinquishes any identity or uniqueness that she started with. 

Ultimately, The Factory is wry commentary on the nature of work that systematically mutated alongside neoliberal reforms which have dehumanised and alienated us from ourselves and others. We are encouraged to reflect on the purposeful conditioning of work and thereby question our acceptance of monotonous and estranged forms of labour. We are awkwardly pushed into a pit of uncertainty, and as readers we are left with the seemingly impossible mission – reconciling our assumed individuality with our compliance to the demands of corporate rapacity.

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