The Factory

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.

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.

"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

"Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory descends from a lineage of workplace fiction that includes Melville’s 'Bartleby the Scrivener,'' Joseph Heller’s Something Happened and Ricky Gervais’ The Office." — Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Oyamada 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 Sehgal, The New York Times