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 novel The Hole won Akutagawa Prize. David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated stories by Genichiro Takahashi, Masatsugu Ono and Toh EnJoe, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat won the 2017/2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. With Sam Bett, he is cotranslating the novels of Mieko Kawakami.
"[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*
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