★ 08/05/2019
Reviewed by Gabe Habash
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.
After quitting five jobs, Yoshiko Ushiyama finds a spot at the factory shredding documents all day. Meanwhile, Yoshio Furufue reluctantly takes a position “studying moss” in another department—in which he is the sole employee. His ostensible goal is to green-roof the whole enterprise, but he’s given no direction and no time frame and so ends up being reduced to a guide for a children’s moss hunt on the factory grounds. Finally, Ushiyama, Yoshiko’s brother, is tasked with proofreading opaque documents with titles like Goodbye to All Your Problems and Mine: A Guide to Mental Health Care , though he doesn’t know where his edits go when he’s done and is told “ou won’t make any mistakes. You can’t.”
Soon, time and the characters’ understanding of life beyond the factory begin to fog, and perhaps Oyamada’s greatest achievement is transferring this disorientation to the reader. Scenes jump in time and loop back, and perspectives shift mid-chapter; at one point Ushiyama starts proofreading a report on the factory’s fauna authored by a child—the same child who asked Furufue to read that same report after Furufue took him on the moss hunt. There is an enclosed, purgatory-like feel to the setting: “The factory was a world of its own,” Furufue thinks at one point. “Only four ways in and out. North, South, East, West. Shouldn’t there be more?” The relentless logic of the factory accounts for everything—meal preference (there are “nearly a hundred cafeterias, and a decent number of restaurants, too”), resources (when Furufue is told it’s best for him to live on factory grounds, he thinks, “The idea of moving here didn’t bother me.... It was just happening so quickly and without my input, without my knowledge”) and, somehow, even the novel’s astonishing ending.
Oyamada expertly weaves in a series of strange phenomena—a middle-aged man known as the Forest Pantser who runs around the factory’s surrounding forests trying to pull the pants off people; huge flocks of a particular species of black bird (“the birds roost in such great numbers you can’t tell one from the next.... there are hundreds of them, all looking toward the factory”)—creating an atmosphere of unease bordering on pernicious. But by refusing to give answers and instead letting the mundane and the uncanny blend together (“I thought I saw one of the smaller women in Print Services holding a black bird by its wings, but when I looked again it was just a toner cartridge”), Oyamada maximizes her puzzle. This nonpareil novel will leave readers reeling and beguiled. (Oct.)
Gabe Habash is the author of Stephen Florida and is the deputy reviews editor of Publishers Weekly .
"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.” "
Store-Bought Solutions to All Our Ills - The Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks
"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 - 5 Books to Read in October
"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 - Briefly Noted Book Reviews
"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?’"
"Strangely chilling..."
Not Lost in Translation: Provocative Foreign Fiction - New York Times - Alison McCulloch
"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."
"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."
Harper's Magazine - Julian Lucas
"[D]ecidedly experimental and subliminally philosophical, it best fits someplace between anti-capitalist science fiction and magic realism."
Asymptote - Andreea Scridon
"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."
Review | The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada - London Magazine - Megan Evershed
"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."
The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada - Ploughshares - Bailey Trela
"Oyamada paints a stirring portrait of modern work-life culture."
TIME Magazine - Annabel Gutterman
"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."
The Factory Is a Chilling Account of the Contemporary Workplace - New Republic - RUMAAN ALAM
"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."
The Atlantic - Stephen Kearse
"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 - Briefly Noted
"A proletarian novella for today’s world."
"A noteworthy young female writer with a distinctive voice."
"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."
Locus Magazine - Ian Mond
"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."
Factory Blues - The Baffler - Sophie Haigney
"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."
The New York Times - Parul Seghal
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.