"[D]ecidedly experimental and subliminally philosophical, it best fits someplace between anti-capitalist science fiction and magic realism."— Andreea Scridon Asymptote
"In a wry, deadpan style, she distills the profound unease of a world where companies grow more and more imperceptibly controlling even as they promise workers less."— Julian Lucas Harper's Magazine
"Through these characters, Oyamada has crafted a titanic ecosystem of modern work life, complete with the obligatory never-ending office dinner with co-workers and the emergence of strange new species conjured up by the meaningless, enervating patterns of the 9-to-5 existence."— Japan Times
"Oyamada deftly ties together the plights of human and nature, both becoming unrecognizable in an inflexible industrial economy. "— Kirkus
"A noteworthy young female writer with a distinctive voice."— Lithub
"The Factory may take its cues from Kafka, but it’s still very much its own thing: a wry, satirical, discombobulating look at how we’ve all become cogs in the great machine of capitalism."— Ian Mond Locus Magazine
"The Factory depicts a strange reality, but really points out how similar Oyamada’s surreal world is to our own. This makes it an ideal novel for our moment."— Megan Evershed London Magazine
"The text feels as disorienting as the place it describes. Exchanges of dialogue are rendered in a single chunky paragraph; a chapter might move back and forth between time with no cue that it’s doing so; the reader might be offered the end of an anecdote then have to read on to find the beginning of it. These are clever tactics, a match of form and subject all the more impressive given this is a first novel."— RUMAAN ALAM New Republic
"Strangely chilling..."— Alison McCulloch New York Times
"The Factory is a tale of inaction rather than revolt, a story about the warm, velvety embrace of production models, in which Oyamada’s bunker-like Ur-factory comes on like a last bastion of security, a White Whale that nobody’s chasing but ends up swallowing you regardless."— Bailey Trela Ploughshares
"Disquieting in its slow creep forward, the book presents copious mysteries: What is the purpose of these individuals’ jobs? What does the factory even make? What is up with the human-sized nutria supposedly living and dying in great numbers on the factory grounds? Perhaps even more unexpected is the way writer Hiroko Oyamada refuses to answer the questions she presents, allowing those mysteries, and their unsettling effects, to linger."— The A.V. Club
"The interplay, in The Factory, between what we believe and what we don’t, what we see and what we can’t, becomes the fabric of this strange world."— Sophie Haigney The Baffler
"She is fond of jump cuts and scenes that dissolve mid-paragraph and flow into the next without so much as a line break. A pleasant vertigo sets in. Objects have a way of suddenly appearing in the hands of characters. Faces become increasingly vivid and grotesque. Nothing feels fixed; everything in the book might be a hallucination."— Parul Seghal The New York Times
"In quiet exasperation, the characters start to ask themselves not what they do for the factory but what the factory does to them. "— The New Yorker
"In quiet exasperation, the characters start to ask themselves not what they do for the factory but what the factory does to them."— The New Yorker
"Hiroko Oyamada’s “The Factory" descends from a different lineage of workplace fiction that includes Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened” and Ricky Gervais’s “The Office.” "— Sam Sacks The Wall Street Journal
"Oyamada paints a stirring portrait of modern work-life culture."— Annabel Gutterman TIME Magazine
"A proletarian novella for today’s world."— Rieko Matsuura
"Three employees at a monolithic factory in an unnamed Japanese city begin to see reality itself seem to mutate in Oyamada’s stellar, mind-bending debut."— Publishers Weekly (starred)
"In surreal, tactile, and often funny prose, Olga Ravn’s The Employees and Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory present the workplace as a hallucinogenic hall of mirrors, a crucible where our sense of self warps and dissolves."— Stephen Kearse The Atlantic
"There’s a blend of the banal and the outrageous that we recognise from a certain strain of modern Japanese literature, and the delivery is exquisite… As the workers toil and their voices blur, it all leads to a question simultaneously outraged and amused: ‘What the hell is wrong with the world?’"— John Self The Guardian
2019-08-19
In Oyamada's cautionary English-language debut, three recent hires at an inscrutable industrial factory find themselves bewildered by their strange new world.
"In times like these, a job's a job," Yoshiko thinks before signing on as a contractor who will shred documents all day in the basement of the eponymous factory. Her brother has taken a temp position proofreading the factory's paperwork, a task so dizzying and incomprehensible that he can't stop falling asleep at his desk. The factory itself is staggeringly large and byzantine; its bureaucracy is predictably opaque; and strange new species are mutating within its walls. This phenomenon we observe mostly through Furufue, a moss scientist hired to green-roof the factory complex, who, given neither direction nor deadline, is left to languish in an unstructured sinecure. But as the narration judders disorientingly across time and multiple perspectives, we realize that neither characters nor plot are the point of this book; rather, Oyamada is interested in crafting an atmosphere—somewhere between mind-numbingly mundane and mind-bendingly surreal—to explore and illuminate the depersonalizing nature of work in contemporary Japan. This results in a kind of lobotomized Kafkaesque quality: The novella's protagonists are so disaffected that they don't have any depth or agency; and after a century-plus of modernity and its discontents, the satire comes across as tame rather than trenchant. What's new and interesting here is the ecological aspect of the critique: Oyamada deftly ties together the plights of human and nature, both becoming unrecognizable in an inflexible industrial economy. But with so few moments of intimacy or optimism, the novella is ultimately a document of deadpan despair, resigned to exaggerate the absurdities of the present rather than try to change them.
Tedium, meaninglessness, and alienation abound in this urgent but unsubtle fiction about the Japanese precariat.
