The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada―one of the most powerfully strange young voices in Japan
The English-language debut of one of Japan's most exciting new writers, The Factory follows three workers at a sprawling industrial factory. Each worker focuses intently on the specific task they've been assigned: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. But their lives slowly become governed by their work―days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What's going on with the strange animals here? And after a while―it could be weeks or years―the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: What am I doing here?
With hints of Kafka and unexpected moments of creeping humor, The Factory casts a vivid―and sometimes surreal―portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of the modern workplace.
"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 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
"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
