Are you into Kafkaesque novellas? Do you, like me, need a weird, short palate-cleanser between giant 600+ page fantasy novels? Do you love books that kind of don’t make sense until you think about it after finishing the last page? If so, I have the book for you!
I read this book based on a recommendation from this Substack – I got it from the library and read it on my flight home from Japan (!) which was extremely appropriate, given that the setting is a Japanese factory. I read it in less than 2 hours, but I am still thinking about it. It’s so short, I hesitate to give too much away, but here’s the gist: a variety of characters are hired to work in various capacities at a prestigious factory. No one really understands how their job fits into the factory as a whole – what does the factory really even do? We aren’t so sure and neither are they! Things are weird but every character finds a way to justify, to themselves mostly, why their particular circumstances aren’t so bad. Things stay weird until the end.
I haven’t read The Metamorphosis but I did listen to Material Girls discuss it and there’s a lot of the same stuff going on here: inscrutable bureaucracy, random animals, very Severance, very late-stage capitalism. If you’re into that, you’ll probably enjoy this! I wouldn’t want to read it all the time but I’ll probably pick up another of Oyamada’s novellas when I need another short, weird book.