#david boyd

‘Bureaupunk’ isn’t an actual genre, but it’s a term I’ve seen thrown around to capture a specific aesthetic: depictions and exaggerations of the sprawling, titanic governmental and corporate bureaucracies of the later 20th century — the identical hallways and lukewarm coffee, the byzantine hierarchies and condescending slogans, and most of all the whole careers spent slaving away at work that seems entirely divorced from anything productive or meaningful or related to the ostensible purpose of the organization. The Factory is, in the tradition of Brazil and what people mean when they say “Kafkaesque,” one of the purest expressions of that style I’ve ever read.

The novella is set in the eponymous Factory — a campus that’s closer to a town than a single business, containing some part of every enterprise the impossibly rich and powerful conglomerate headquartered at its heart has interests in — and at least one or two of everything the employees working there might ever need. The story follows three different young new employees as they start work in separate departments, each of them growing confused and alienated by work that seems inexplicably divorced from actually accomplishing anything. As they continue, each becomes more and more uncomfortably aware of how strange and surreal the Factory can become, and of the unique wildlife that calls the Factory and its campus home.

There’s only barely a plot here, and not an especially focused or complete one. The book is instead entirely dedicated to capturing a specific mood. This is a story about being trapped in a meaningless, tedious job because it’s not that bad — and you’re too desperate for the security to risk giving it up — even as it eventually swallows you whole. To a lesser degree, it’s about how adamant society as a whole is that having exactly that sort of job, and using it to pay your own way, is basically the single most important part of being an adult.

I don’t know if this is just a difference in socio-economic conditions in Japan or a conscious choice on the author’s part, but it felt oddly dated — or I suppose anachronistic. Both the technology and the economy feel like they belong to another era. On the one hand, no one seems to own a cellphone; proofreading is done with hard copies and a red pen; personal computers seem rare and exotic. On the other, the specific work and the description of the company feel almost oddly non-malicious. The surreal make-work comes with paid time off, and some of the restaurants and cafeterias in the Factory sound legitimately delicious. More seriously, the mood of the piece feels sort of ’90s (Office Space, etc.) to me — and if this were written in the U.S., I would expect it to be less about secure work in a sprawling campus and more about the experience of precarity or the gig economy or something similar. Which isn’t in any way a criticism — it’s hardly the book’s fault it’s not a different book entirely — but it did strike me.

In any event, this is literature-literature, with the prose and style far more important than any specific plot beat. Even more so with the magical-realist turn it takes at certain points and the true uncanniness occurring on the edges (I’m a big fan of the washing machine lizards, personally). That style is interesting, even if it took some effort to adjust to. The story is told in close first-person, stream-of-consciousness narration, in massive and meandering paragraphs that jump back and forth between scenes and from dialogue to introspection and back again basically without warning. More than that, the narration jumps between points of view with no warning at all — literally in the middle of a line halfway through a three-page paragraph. It’s (quite intentionally, I assume) disorienting and at times a little frustrating. Still, once I got the hang of it, it wasn’t a difficult read. The very close narration also allows for some enjoyably petty and mean-spirited descriptions of different characters.

Daredevil: Born Again

Season 1, “Excessive Force”

Director: David Boyd

David Boyd  (Australian, 1924 -2011)

The Dreamer On The Cliff,  1970

oil on canvas, 120 x 151 cm

1) Theme of gender roles in workplaces. Shibata is the only woman in her section at the office, and all menial work like getting tea or coffee for others, cleaning up the fridge, etc. falls on her. It makes it difficult for her to focus on her actual work for which she was hired. It also gives her less time to herself at home as she almost daily ends up leaving for home from work past her time. So, one day in annoyance she comes up with the lie of her pregnancy. That solves all of the above issues for her in addition to gaining her the maternity leave that gives her a break from her annoying workplace.

2) Theme of loneliness. Shibata seeks solitude but she is also alone at times. She considers herself less miserable than the married women who despite being drained and tired themselves do the housework for their family, while she can spend her time doing what she likes. She does not like talking to people who do not care for her but would ask intruding questions about her private life and comment on what she isn't doing right according to them. Talking to those people makes her feel very alone. And it is not even as simple as avoiding the people she finds annoying because perhaps the vibrancy in those interactions makes her solitary apartment more darker: But why do I have to deal with these people who try to act like they care about me or my pregnancy while they ask the most inane, prying questions? Why is it up to me to produce answers that please them? And why is the way home so much darker and colder on nights like that? More than that, why is my apartment so dark when I come home alone from aerobics, after talking with the others about nothing in particular, snacking on whatever sweets are spread out on the table? There is also the fact that not everyone she finds annoying is so merely because they have nothing better to do or because they are inconsiderate. I think this was particularly emphasized through Higashinakano's character. He seemed annoying at the beginning, but later we find out that he has his own emotional reasons related to pregnancy and babies. At one point she also talks about family: Maybe that’s what making a family is all about: creating an environment in which people make space for one another— maybe without even trying, just naturally, to make sure that nobody’s forgotten.

3)Theme of lies. She is a 34 year old unmarried single woman living alone. But her lie turns her into an unmarried single mother, and she dedicates herself completely to this lie doing everything exactly as a pregnant woman would do for the entire period of a normal pregnancy. She does this because she doesn't care about lying to those intruding people and this lie enables her to maintain her privacy while still interacting with them: Even if it’s a lie, it’s a place of my own.

4)Theme of religion and motherhood. She talks to Mary, the Virgin Mother, in her head at parts. She sympathises with the role thrust upon Mary and the circumstances of her becoming the Virgin Mother and being eternally known as such, her personhood entirely ignored. Shibata too, after all, could get out of her uncompensated for extra duties only after she turned herself into a would-be mother through her lie. She finds solace in talking to this famous mother who must not have had it easy either, especially in those times, eons ago.

5) Theme of body. I liked how relatable Shibata's self-consciousness was: It was the bottom part of me that was different. I quickly dried myself off and tried on some skirts and jeans. Nothing looked right. My thighs were jutting out. And the way I looked from behind was . . . Well, it was just too painful to behold. This. I have felt this too. And I was happy for her when she felt better about her body after her walks and aerobics: It hadn’t even been three weeks since I’d signed up, but my body was already changing, little by little. Whenever I got out of the bath and looked at my backside in the mirror, I could see a real difference in my hips and thighs. My core felt stronger, and I didn’t feel like I was about to fall over all the time. My belly was getting bigger, and sometimes I felt a pain in my back, but it wasn’t unbearable. Honestly, I was feeling better than I ever had in my life.

6) The writing. I liked all the descriptions of the mundane day-to-day life activities. And her thoughts. Her overthinking tendency was also very relatable to me.

What I didn't like: