There’s no denying it: workers’ rights are hot right now. We’re taking it to The Man, we’re dismantling capitalism, one picket line at a time! So, it was a timely pick to read The Factory, a proletarian novella by Hiroko Oyamada. It was published in the original Japanese (工場) in 2013, and the English translation (by David Boyd) came out in 2019.

The Factory is short, just 116 pages – I knocked it over in a single sitting. It’s complex, though, with a strange structure that alternates between the perspectives of three central characters. Each of them work at “the factory”, doing McJobs that none of them really understand.

There’s Yoshiko Ushiyama, a recent liberal arts graduate who applies for a permanent position but instead gets offered a contract role, shredding documents.

Then there’s Yoshio Furufue, a former scholar and moss specialist. He’s hired as an executive, ostensibly to “green roof” the factory buildings, but he really has no idea what the heck he’s doing and no one at the factory seems to care if he just sits around collecting his huge salary and cataloguing a species of moss here and there.

Finally, there’s Yoshiko’s unnamed brother, who was fired from his permanent position as a systems engineer at a different company. His girlfriend was able to get him a temp job at the factory, proofreading documents – hardly living the dream. He frequently falls asleep at his desk.

There’s no specific timeline in The Factory, but there’s a “gotchya” moment for the reader towards the end that reveals the events of the novel have taken place over a span of about fifteen years. That matches the weird merging of the protagonists’ perspectives and *vibes*; they start off as distinct characters with their own motivations, but over the course of The Factory the boundaries between them – and between their physical form and the setting – blur and dissolve.

If you’re thinking that sounds a lot like something our buddy Franz Kafka would write, you’re not the only one. The Factory has been widely reviewed and analysed as a Kafkaesque novel. The strange imagery, the oppressive circumstances of the narrative, the nightmarish repetition – all the elements are there, all calibrated to leave you feeling deeply unsettled by the end.

The setting is the big draw of The Factory (for me, anyway). It sounds a lot like Amazon or one of the other big Silicon Valley conglomerates, but Oyamada doesn’t specify the company’s name or purpose at all. In fact, even the city in which it’s based is never described or named. The company’s grounds are completely self-sufficient, with living quarters, food and entertainment, everything workers could possibly need – one of the characters says it “has everything but a graveyard”.

Unsurprisingly, it seems that Oyamada drew on her own experiences working in a factory. Apparently, a temporary role in an automaker’s subsidiary really stoked her fires. She came at this novel, full guns blazing, to expose the powerlessness of the working class and the suffocation of class division cloaked in routine and efficiency. You don’t get a gold star for recognising The Factory as an allegory, the factory workers representing the working class on a broader scale; they are completely removed from (indeed, have no understanding of) their contributions in terms of production, and don’t benefit from the specific products of their labour at all.

The energy that Oyamada poured into the metaphor seems to have tapped her reserves when it comes to answering narrative questions, though. There are no firm answers, by the end of The Factory, about what it is or does, what happens to the workers, where the strange animals that inhabit the grounds came from, what the deal is with the Forest Pantser (my favourite character, you’ll have to read it to understand).

Reading The Factory really took me back to my undergrad days, studying sociology and arguing about Marxism in workshops. I went to bed that night dreaming of baguettes and the bourgeoisie. I’d recommend it to any fellow pinkos, and fans of Sayaka Murata or Yoko Ogawa.

My favourite Amazon reviews of The Factory:

• “It makes no sense, definitely not worth reading and I would never recommend it to anyone but that’s just my opinion, give it a read and find out yourself.” – Mark J. Morris
• “The story was pretty dumb with what it had the main characters doing all day: proofreading pointless documents and shredding paper. Real exciting.” – Greg
• “Essentially, three characters all begin work at “The Factory,” a massive, mysterious place where everything seems great at first, but quickly, all sorts of weird, unexplainable things begin to happen and the jobs, which never had any purpose, begin to consume the characters, destroying their creativity and individuality. Oh wait! That’s what supposedly happens to actual people in their real-world jobs! I get it now! This book is actually a brilliant expose of modern life and the soul-crushing monotony and conformity of the industrial-economic complex! Please – spare me. Oyamada is no Kafka and this book is a complete waste of time.” – Gerald O’Malley

Britt-Marie Was Here has been calling to me from my to-be-read shelf ever since I read My Grandmother Sends Her Regards And Apologises about a year ago. I was fairly sure that the books existed in the same universe, and the titular Britt-Marie in this story was the same Britt-Marie who lived in the apartment block with Elsa, Granny and co. Turns out, I was right! (Naturally.)

Britt-Marie Was Here (Britt-Marie var här in the original Swedish, translated into English by Henning Koch) is Fredrik Backman’s fourth book. It was first published in 2014, and the English translation came out two years later. It didn’t make as much of a splash as A Man Called Ove, or any of Backman’s other #bookstagram darlings, which is weird because the premise and tone is classic Backman.

The story revolves around Britt-Marie, a middle-aged fusspot recently separated from her beloved husband Kent. She knew his collars sometimes smelled of perfume (before she starched them, of course), but his infidelity was confirmed when his mistress called an ambulance to attend to the heart attack he had on top of her. That was the final straw (understandable).

Fearing that, without Kent as an (albeit inattentive) witness to her life, she might someday die without anyone noticing, Britt-Marie goes out in search of a job and a life of her own. That’s how she finds herself in the backwater town of Borg, the only person desperate enough to take on the role of caretaker for a soon-to-be-demolished community center.

This is a Fredrik Backman novel, so of course, Britt-Marie finds herself drawn in to the lives and dramas of the small-town citizens. Despite her firm intentions of simply keeping the community center clean (with a bucket-load of baking soda), she ends up roped into coaching a soccer team of ragamuffins, and best friends with the drunken pizzeria owner.

Britt-Marie Was Here is a darker read than A Man Called Ove or My Grandmother Sends Her Regards And Apologises – in fact, in many ways, it reminded me of the criminally-underrated movie Green Street Hooligans. The citizens of Borg are down on their luck, poverty and family violence are common, and the kids of the town have nowhere to go and (almost) nothing going for them. But it’s still a very touching read, with Backman’s trademark life-affirming philosophy – and a few laughs, mostly at Britt-Marie’s expense.

“Britt-Marie is not actually passive-aggressive. She’s considerate. After she heard Kent’s children saying she was passive-aggressive she was extra-considerate for several weeks.”

Britt-Marie Was Here (Page 3)

Britt-Marie Was Here is a good one for fans of small-town romances, and/or movies where the kids get their sports field in the end after they defeat the evil developers. I suspect that Backman might’ve figured out he was onto something with the sports theme, as I hear Beartown (one of his best-sellers) and its sequels use ice-hockey in a similar way. That one will be the next Backman on my list, I think!

P.S. Britt-Marie Was Here was adapted into a film starring Pernilla August and directed by Tuva Novotny, released in 2019. I watched the trailer, it actually looks pretty good (better than the abomination of A Man Called Otto, anyway).

My favourite Amazon reviews of Britt-Marie Was Here:

• “I had already read Ove; why did I need to read the same basic book over again?” – Linda S
• “Thankfully the compulsive main character relaxed a bit toward the end.
  That’s it. Save your time.” – MeFree
• “With all the words we have in the English language, why does practically every paragraph have to have a curse word? I don’t even hear trash like that out on the street. And the morals of the book? – no thank you.
  It was trash & that’s exactly where it went.” – SP
• “It is just plain stupid, if you ask me. I know you didn’t ask me, but it’s my opinion just the same.” – Kathleen