Celia recommends The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada:

There’s a Lauren Berlant quotation that I think of sometimes, which goes like this: in the face of a life that isn’t meaningful, there is a “life drive psychosis, a radical splitting that makes it possible to live on by leeching the intensity that ordinary contact otherwise engenders.” Without hope, people embrace flatness, because flatness allows one to go on living in a situation that should be unendurable. Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory is a novel of flatness, one that embraces boredom and the very quiet horror of monotony. I’m not sure I’ve read anything quite like it. A lot of works that engage with the senselessness of life ask their readers to experience anguish or the shock of finding meaninglessness where you expected to find meaning. Oyamada asks you to live with the flatness of her characters, the ways in which their lives are hollowed out without their own awareness.

Reading this novel can feel a little bit like the endless distraction of doing busywork or scrolling through a phone, the way that a mind in search of distraction will pick up one task, then another, then change back to the first, holding each strand clear from the other with a kind of focused unenjoyment. The Factory follows three main characters, switching between their perspectives in alternating chapters, which don’t neatly align in terms of timeline. Ushiyama is a young woman who’s struggling to find a fulltime job. She interviews for a permanent position at the eponymous factory, a position for which she appears to be overqualified, only to be told that her employment history renders her ineligible and she might qualify instead as an hourly worker, shredding endless documents in a basement.

Her brother, meanwhile, is an engineer who’s recently lost his job when his company laid off most of its staff. He takes a proofreading position at the factory through the temp agency where his girlfriend works, and finds himself repeatedly falling asleep in his cubicle as he reads documents that are increasingly meaningless. Nobody minds or even notices that he sleeps through most of his shifts. No one appears to read or edit the documents that he proofreads. His days are punctuated by his lunch break, by the breaks his coworkers take to brush their teeth in the public bathroom.

The third narrator, Furufue, is a graduate student researching moss at a local university. He’s recruited by the factory to lead a green roofing project on the factory campus. The factory pays him a lavish salary and puts him up in a factory-owned house, but it slowly becomes clear that no one expects the project to go anywhere or cares if it does. Furufue is welcome to spend years wandering the factory and analyzing specimens of moss, and no one will ever ask him for anything or expect him to show what he’s accomplished. He lives in security, but without meaning or purpose. He can’t quite visualize the lives of the contingent workers around him. Surely everything is fine. It’s easy to live as long as you surrender to the fact that you’re unnecessary, and go on drawing your salary.

There’s a small cast of ancillary characters—coworkers, managers, a girlfriend—but the last main character is really the factory itself, a sprawling creature that includes offices, housing, restaurants and cafeterias, its own bus system, a carefully hierarchical system of access cards and security. It makes nothing. Or if it once made something, it’s so unimportant to its real function that no one can remember what it made or why. Its real function is to be a sort of monotony machine, an ecosystem of impoverishment.

The factory has its own animal life. There are coypu, giant semiaquatic rodents, and flocks of black birds called factory shags that are everywhere, in the first sentence of the novel and the last, and a colony of lizards that live in the washing machines and eat soap. They, stranded within the factory as on an island, become an object of fascination or frustration. A child trying to strike up a friendship with Furufue gives him a report about the factory animals, which, without explanation, arrives also on Ushiyama’s brother’s desk for proofreading (just as surely, it will later be shredded). It’s as if the most trivial and intangible things, the stuff a novel would usually be made of—the child’s curiosity and wonder, the secret lives of animals, the whole natural world—can all be fed into the factory’s machinery and emerge as an artifact that makes you want to sleep through the day to avoid it.

Then too, The Factory’s stream of narration is itself fragmentary, cutting between points in time without warning or pattern. The effect is to create a sort of narrative determinism: when Ushiyama stands outside a restaurant with a man she’s just met, half hoping and half dreading that he’ll ask her to eat lunch with him, the novel lurches without transition into the aftermath of that lunch, and then back to the moment that he asks her. There’s a misery and an embarrassment in knowing what’s going to happen, especially when the future isn’t particularly novel or good, but just a continuation of the same senseless sequence of events.

Is there, then, any hope? The factory is not without its pleasures, but they are mostly perverse ones: the relief of work that doesn’t require you to think, the safety of isolation and indifference, the comfort of being underpaid but not destitute, of having nothing asked of you, of sitting on a shelf in a room whose door no one ever opens, of accepting that you are worth as little as the world claims. If there is an escape, I think it might be not in joy but in anguish, as when Ushiyama, near the end of the novel, thinks, “I want to work and I’m lucky enough to be able to work. Of course I’m grateful for that. How could I not be? Except, well, I don’t want to work… Life has nothing to do with work and work has no real bearing on life.” Life is somewhere else, but it is inaccessible. It is in the voice that asks, Please, give me beauty, love, compassion, even suffering, but send me something that allows me to feel.