life path

Halloween is no longer a time for remembrance, but it still reveals our need to enter liminal spaces: those moments when we're standing on the breach of fear and delight, and those times when we wish that the veil between the living and the dead would lift for a while. But most of all, it hints at the winter to come, opening the door to the dark

“...I was a liberal arts major at university, where my research focused on the Japanese language. Specifically, I’m interested in how people communicate. While pursuing my research, I became curious about the use of language in print media. I was especially fascinated by the effectiveness of particular expressions and sentence structures. Ideally,

The protagonist is Ushiyama Yoshiko, a BA liberal arts graduate. We meet her immediately as she is interviewing for a permanent position in ‘the factory’ to a middle manager named Goto.

She speaks very eloquently in this interview about the interest she has in language used in print media due to the research on communication in Japanese that she conducted during her degree, and states how she would like to use that experience in this career.

She also relates this to a lifelong relationship to the factory and its products, saying how she has seen advertisements as a child that drew her to working for the technologically advanced and ethical company. This demonstrates to the interviewer that Yoshiko has conducted her own research about the company, as well as presenting an emotional argument for her desire to work there, and flattering the company and thus interviewer as she does so.

We haven’t known Yoshiko long enough to understand yet whether these claims are genuine, but we understand her to be intelligent enough to go about her interview in such a way regardless, using multiple persuasive tactics in a relatively short space of time. She is also able to pull this spiel from the top of her head, without any further prompting, so we understand that she has prepared well, irrespective of her actual interests or whether the factory really does have ‘famously high standards, both technologically and ethically speaking’.

To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we grow gradually older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are

As we so often find in ancient folklore, the Cailleach offers us a cyclical metaphor for life, one in which the energies of spring can arrive again and again, nurtured by the deep retreat of winter. We are no longer accustomed to thinking in this way. We are instead in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear; a long march from birth to death

An idea that pervades work culture is the concept of the ‘real job’. The phrase implies it is something tangible and objective, but in fact is anything but. How can we define a ‘real job’? Working between the hours of nine and five? The pay? The place of work itself? There are many lucrative careers that do not fit into a neat category, and many

Inspired when reading the first chapter of The Factory (2013) by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd (2019)

This was a liminal moment in the calendar: a time between two worlds, and between two phases of the year, when worshippers were just about to cross a boundary but hadn't yet done so. Samhain was a way of marking that ambiguous moment when you didn't know who you were about to become, or what the future would hold. It was a celebration of limbo.

Our

Doing those deeply unfashionable things - slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting - are radical acts these days, but they are essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you'll expose all those painful nerve endings, and feel so raw that you'll need to take care

It was almost strange how I’d managed to go through five jobs here without ever working for them. Maybe it looked like I was avoiding the factory, but I really wasn’t. I’d always seen the factory in a positive light, ever since that childhood field trip. If anything, I thought, maybe unconsciously, that I didn’t deserve to work somewhere so

Yoshiko tells us that her parents did not encourage her to work at the factory as many other families did, so she has worked five jobs already without working there, none of which she has remained at for longer than a year. However, even her brother began working in the factory offices in the city centre after graduation.

She says that she wasn’t trying to avoid working at the factory, and if she was it was only because she did not see herself as worthy enough to work somewhere so important.

The factory’s marketing to children through the education system has worked on Yoshiko, someone who did not even have parents coaxing her towards it. She sees the workplace as somewhere desirable - a place where only those worthy few can toil. The factory is seen as a ‘real job’, and Yoshiko frames herself slightly in this chapter as having idly taken other jobs that could not be considered beneficial careers in the way that the factory’s could. Not only does Yoshiko think this way, but we learn that society at large and the company does as well, for her qualifications and well-prepared interview do not guarantee her the employment she seeks. Her track record of short term jobs means that she is seen as unreliable.

Here is another truth about wintering: you'll find wisdom in your winter, and once it's over, it's your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it's our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It's an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out. This may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, passed down carefully