Hiroko Oyamada’s novel The Factory (A Fábrica) landed in my hands in a mysterious way: recommended by a friend who told me simply to read it, believing I would eventually be surprised.
Set in contemporary Japan, the story transcends borders by addressing universal themes: the precarity of labor, and the objectification and dehumanization of the worker. Through suffocating, claustrophobic prose, Oyamada constructs a dense metaphor for the current labor landscape and the challenges facing the working class—challenges that are by no means restricted to Japan.
At the center of the novel, three narrators share their routines within the Factory, a place with no defined name and roles that are diluted to the extreme. There is a sense of isolation, confusion regarding tasks, and an essential disconnection between the individual and the meaning of their own work. The oppressive environment and mechanical routine turn life inside the Factory into an existential prison, where time passes without leaving any dignity, purpose, or fulfillment.
This reality echoes one of the major dilemmas of the 21st century: the alienation produced by bureaucratic, repetitive, or technologically mediated jobs. Although the employees in the book find everything they supposedly need within the Factory, they lack precisely dignity and purpose, which are only partially filled by automatic gestures like excessive eating or small, empty rewards. The existential void portrayed in the book strongly resembles contemporary challenges—especially the difficulty of finding meaning in one’s daily work life.
In the 21st century, the arrival of the digital era and the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution revolutionized the world of work, making it more flexible and decentralized, but also more unstable and fragmented. New modalities such as remote work, freelancing, and temporary contracts have multiplied, conferring greater autonomy but requiring continuous adaptation and imposing barriers to the consolidation of solid bonds between workers and companies.
The "flexibilization" of work, praised by many as a synonym for freedom, frequently amplifies precarity. App-based workers, for example, are managed by algorithms, lacking transparency and uncertain about when they will receive bonuses. For a large part of the workforce, the promise of autonomy turns into exhausting schedules, financial insecurity, and difficulties in protecting their physical and mental health.
Technological advancement has also imposed the need for constant professional updates. The inability to keep up with new technical demands can mean exclusion from the labor market, aggravating anxieties and uncertainties for workers in various sectors.
A striking element in Oyamada’s novel is precisely how alienation extends beyond the workplace and invades the characters' entire daily lives, questioning whether there is life beyond the workday. This inquiry echoes discussions on the balance between personal and professional life, which are increasingly urgent in a time of hyperconnectivity and constant haste.
Just as in Oyamada’s Factory, 21st-century workers often see themselves reduced to interchangeable parts, performing fragmented tasks, often without understanding their real function in the production chain. The sense of uselessness and anonymity expressed by the book’s characters finds a parallel in the daily lives of modern professionals, pressured by unattainable goals, avalanches of data, and a lack of effective recognition.
The current world of work, despite being more plural and open to innovative formats, imposes challenges such as time management, the need for multiple skills, and a chronic malaise resulting from the weakening of rights and job security.
The Factory serves as a distorted yet faithful mirror of the anxieties and challenges of the contemporary worker. Oyamada manages to capture the feeling of suffocation, alienation, and lack of perspective of those who find themselves trapped in an indifferent global machinery, a dynamic that repeats itself outside of fiction—in today’s offices, industries, and apps. The reflection proposed by the novel is a call to rethink labor conditions and recover the human, dignified, and creative meaning of work, which is so threatened in the 21st century.
★★★★☆
A Fábrica
Hiroko Oyamada
Título original: 工場
Tradução de Jefferson José Teixeira
144 páginas
Editora Todavia
