[D]ecidedly experimental and subliminally philosophical, it best fits someplace between anti-capitalist science fiction and magic realism.—Asymptote
Born in Hiroshima in 1983, Hiroko Oyamada won the Shincho Prize for New Writers for The Factory, which was drawn from her experiences working as a temp for an automaker’s subsidiary. Her following novel, The Hole, won the Akutagawa Prize and will be published by New Directions in 2020.
Translated by David Boyd
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
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
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
Strangely chilling…—Alison McCulloch, The New York Times
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, The New Republic
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
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
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
The translation by David Boyd is fluent and atmospheric.—Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books
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
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
[D]ecidedly experimental and subliminally philosophical, it best fits someplace between anti-capitalist science fiction and magic realism.—Asymptote
Oyamada paints a stirring portrait of modern work-life culture.—Annabel Gutterman, TIME Magazine
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
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
A noteworthy young female writer with a distinctive voice.—Lit Hub
