Staff Picks: The Factory and The Hole

Down the Rabbit Hole: The Strange and Wonderful World of Hiroko Oyamada
by JP Poole

Reading the novels of Hiroko Oyamada is a bit like walking into a test kitchen. Amidst the hustle and bustle, you watch flames leap six feet high, inhale mysterious aromas, taste flavors you never knew existed, and observe someone singe the top of a cake with a blowtorch. For a book under a hundred pages, The Hole especially is filled with food: mugicha tea, pickled cucumber, miso soup, rice, omelets, dried squid, Kameda Crisps, a spindly herb-like plant called myoga (Japanese ginger). Frankly, it’s nice to see characters eat, it’s a reminder that while they might be a bunch of symbols on a page, we still relate to them because they share our appetites—they get hungry after a long day’s work just like we do.

More so than character, the main ingredient in Oyamada’s work is place. Place is the bed of rice that plot is built around. Place is what tricks readers into believing they’re encountering something static, and recognizable, that is until Oyamada begins to shift the ground and cracks and fissures form, revealing strange and unsettling entities that were lurking all along. Her first book, The Factory, is set at a sprawling live/work campus akin to the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, or Google—a mini-city, complete with different colored badges, corporate lingo, and a company “ecosystem” that one must work to become a part of, or risk exclusion. Within the factory are species of animals that seem to be taking over—they arrive like a flock of birds outside of a fast food joint waiting for French fries to drop. There are Grayback Coypu (aka Nutria) that seem to be growing larger each year; Washer Lizards, reptiles that have learned to live off of lint fibers; and Factory Shags, black birds (think Cormorant) that have no fear of people and whose numbers are ballooning out of control. It’s a bit Hitchcock, a bit George Bernard Shaw. Animal invasion meets industrial sprawl, unchecked commercial growth and expansion, a threat that one senses could swallow humanity whole.

The setting in her newest book, The Hole, is a remote suburb along a river—with the nearest grocery store a long walk away and buses that run every hour. Not the liveliest setting; but then all you have to do is wait a few pages before the predictable turns intriguing. Asa’s husband Muneaki has been transferred to a new office a few miles from where he grew up. The timing happens to be perfect. Asa’s mother-in-law, Tomiko, offers the young couple the house she owns next door rent free. Asa’s comforted by the fact that they are moving next door to Tomiko, not in with her; it’s a chance for the couple to get their footing, and save, save, save. Asa gladly quits her job in the city and becomes a housewife for the summer, spending long hours alone, cooking meals for her husband, running errands, finding that, without a full-time job, the days are endless. Of her new mind-numbing unemployed life, Asa says:

In theory, I could watch TV, use the computer, read a book, bake like I used to when I was single—but it seemed like everything cost money. I had to spend money to pass the time. People say housewives get free room and board and even time to nap, but the truth is napping was the most economical way to make it through the day.

What you should also know is that it’s summer in the suburb and oppressively hot. The cicadas are cranked up loud. Asa states: “To my human ear, they sounded like a bunch of machines, a spray of emotionless noise.” She has to do her grocery shopping early in the morning; her husband needs the car, so she’s essentially housebound. (A familiar feeling, right?) Things turn strange when Asa’s sent on an errand. Tomiko needs some money deposited, so Asa must walk to the nearest 7-Eleven to deposit the cash. (That, too, is a bit strange.) On her way to the store, she sees an animal she can’t identify: it’s not a dog, or a raccoon, but a large black furry animal with stick legs, round ears, and a long tail. Instinct propels her to follow it to the river. It’s then that she falls into a deep hole. While this hole doesn’t lead to another world, everything thereafter takes on a hallucinatory air as thick as summer’s humidity. After falling into the hole, Asa is not the same, and the suburb and its occupants aren’t either.

Oyamada balances the recognizable boredom of modern life—a life where one must think about savings plans, benefits, permanent positions, home loans, and taxes—with ecological strangeness: plants, insects, and animals growing up around us as we exist. People, too, are strange creatures. After seeing the animal, Asa can’t forget it. She realizes that it isn’t something she can Google. Her description is too generic and would produce “millions of hits.” The more she learns about the animal, the more she questions reality. Like Alice in Wonderland, which Oyamada references in the book, Asa falls down a rabbit hole. Her brother-in-law, an outsider, who lives in a shack, doesn’t work, and is a shut-in, leads her closer to the animal, her white rabbit. He wisely states: “People always fail to notice things. Animals, cicadas, puddles of melted ice cream on the ground, the neighborhood shut-in. But what do you expect? It seems like most folks don’t see what they don’t want to see.”

He’s right. Think about all the strange things we choose to ignore (perhaps because we have to): creepy crawling insects in the sink, an odd-colored mushroom, invisible-to-the-eye microbes that feast on our human skin, without which we’d be in deep trouble. Writers, artists, thinkers—these are the outsiders, who help us to remove the horse blinders and see what surrounds us. Oyamada’s fiction is refreshing for how much it defamiliarizes everyday existence. There are things in life that are deeply familiar—punching the clock, shopping at the co-op, watching reality TV—but there are also mysteries, wonders, oddities that we cannot name. The natural world is especially intriguing and a bit suspicious because, like Asa, we can sense changes a-brewin’. Oyamada’s work begs the question: What happens when creatures know more about us than we know about them? Read more of her novels and perhaps we shall find out.

Staff Picks: The Factory

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.