2025 Book Review #62 â The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (trans. David Boyd)
âBureaupunkâ isnât an actual genre, but itâs a term Iâve seen thrown around to capture a specific aesthetic: depictions and exaggerations of the sprawling, titanic governmental and corporate bureaucracies of the later 20th century â 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 âKafkaesque,â one of the purest expressions of that style Iâve ever read.
The novella is set in the eponymous Factory â a campus thatâs 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 â 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.
Thereâs 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 itâs not that bad â and youâre too desperate for the security to risk giving it up â even as it eventually swallows you whole. To a lesser degree, itâs 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 donât know if this is just a difference in socio-economic conditions in Japan or a conscious choice on the authorâs part, but it felt oddly dated â 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 â90s (Office Space, etc.) to me â 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 isnât in any way a criticism â itâs hardly the bookâs fault itâs not a different book entirely â 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 (Iâm 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 â literally in the middle of a line halfway through a three-page paragraph. Itâs (quite intentionally, I assume) disorienting and at times a little frustrating. Still, once I got the hang of it, it wasnât a difficult read. The very close narration also allows for some enjoyably petty and mean-spirited descriptions of different characters.
Iâm not sure who the target audience Iâd recommend this to really is. But if, like me, youâre just kind of ambiently looking for decent litfic in translation, then I heartily recommend it.

















