Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory gives the lie to the idea that the Americans and the Japanese are so different when it comes to our relationship with our jobs. It’s a workplace satire that will make a lot of sense to American readers ... [The]t tension between fantasy and reality is present throughout the book...Perhaps the book isn’t satire, really; even in its most over-the-top moments it is telling it straight. And like all workplace novels, The Factory underscores the folly of how so many of us spend our days. Work life’s odd rituals and petty grievances are rich fodder, and Oyamada has a number of details...that will make you chuckle with recognition ... 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 in 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 its beginning. These are clever tactics, a match of form and subject all the more impressive given this is a first novel ... I so respect Oyamada’s book that I can’t ruin it for the reader. I’ll say only that at its conclusion, The Factory climbs into a register probably best described as magical ... There are readers who will hate this: I think it’s clear throughout that this turn is inevitable—not its specifics, which are surprising, but its tone. It’s horrific and scary, while at the same time affirming and beautiful.

... enigmatic ... The voices, and attitudes, of the three are identical: puzzled, passive and melancholy. Only a sudden pronoun shift or small detail indicates a shift in perspective. It’s an alertness Oyamada inculcates in her reader. 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. Food is the only reality and comfort ... David Boyd’s translation is smooth and plain-spoken, if occasionally marred by a jarring American phrase. It captures the aridity and somnolence of life at the factory ... truthful, indignant, evasive and, very much, still in progress ... The proofreader and moss expert are thinly, indifferently drawn. Only Yoshiko, with her harsh, unpredictable edge, has the charisma of a fully imagined character. Subsidiary plot points and characters are summoned up only to be forgotten. The story and central ideas still need time to ripen and connect; they remain merely suggestive, slightly unsure, a little garbled, like Yoshiko’s own reasoning ... the book feels too diffuse for satire, too lonely and questioning. The conventions of the novel, or the character, seem less interesting to Oyamada than mapping a particular emotional state: the intersection of numbness and fear that is induced by the company and all it seems to represent about precarity, alienation, climate change. The questions the characters finally ask of themselves — Why am I here? What role do I play? — have nothing to do with their jobs and everything, we learn, to do with the real notion of work at hand.

... at first glance it could be off-putting. Lines of thought change without warning. Character dialogue proceeds without the usual paragraph breaks. And when you least expect it, the scene concludes and you find yourself in another scene, mid-action, sometimes mid-conversation. The Factory is disorienting; reading it makes one feel trapped in a maze, where every turn leads down another endless corridor of blank walls until those walls give and you’re suddenly somewhere else. The metaphor is apt for a satire about workplace bureaucracy ... At its core, The Factory is an indictment of capitalism: the way it uses us, the ways it fails us, the way it hurts us. It’s a mirror to our own world, but a distorted one. Indeed, much can be said about Oyamada’s skill at world building, from the idiosyncratic details of the factory to the structure of the book itself when we come to question how long these characters have been in the factory and how much time has passed, suggesting the factory is inescapable. She creates not so much a labyrinth but an entire ridiculous, claustrophobic and sinister world.

In a wry, deadpan style, [Oyamada] distills the profound unease of a world where companies grow more and more imperceptibly controlling even as they promise workers less. Very little happens in The Factory, and Oyamada’s tendency to plot through the drifting accumulation of odd encounters—strolls, moss hunts, co-worker dinners, the vanishing or sudden appearance of colleagues—would have been more effective in a longer work. The characters, possibly by design, are regrettably indistinct. But the narcotized vision of an endlessly accommodating company town feels prescient in the era of 'smart cities' chartered by Alphabet, Amazon, or Mohammed bin Salman; in plans for Neom, a futuristic city-state,

There is more than meets the eye in this seemingly mundane narrative ... The active monotony of the industrial stillness, smelling slightly of existential horror, defies the traditional expectations one would have of a book; in other words, there is no plot, little actually happens, and it lacks a sense of drama—all unfortunately realistic aspects of working in a major corporation. In this sense, the novella is the perfect form for such a subject, as any longer description of this alienated landscape would have been dull. The decision to alternate first person narrators is striking: it requires precise execution, and Oyamada succeeds, as it is a vehicle for deliberate confusion, making for a trompe-l’oeil effect. Later, we do not know whether we are in a space of years or months (though the pacing is quite rapid and engaging), and reality is brought into question by way of this ambiguity ... intriguing and self-sustaining in its capacity to keep the mystery alive. Overall, The Factory proves to be an exacting, well-written work.

It’s all remarkably disquieting and unnerving. Like Kafka, Oyamada is also concerned about how institutions—in her case corporate monoliths such as Amazon or Wal-Mart—gradually strip the individual of their identity, their sense of purpose, through the tedium of pointless, repetitive jobs ... Oyamada has a voice of her own, a dry sense of humor, a feeling for the absurd, and a willingness to experiment. One of the most confounding and yet effective aspects of The Factory is how the narrative jumps around in time ... By the end of the novel you’re as alienated and unmoored from reality as the characters.

Ms. Oyamada toys with some interesting narrative effects ... captures the woozy, disassociated feeling of plugging along in a pointless office routine. In this case, though, you’re paying for the experience, not vice versa.

In casting the most mundane workplace details and interactions as abstruse and dreamlike, Oyamada makes work feel inescapable ... The novel brims with these tiny, tense moments, highlighting the ways in which even fleeting aspects of labor are weighted and exhausting ... Oyamada’s playful, jerky prose and brisk plotting keep the book buoyant despite its bleak air ... Oyamada, especially, illustrates how multifaceted working life often is .... Oyamada’s ecological interpretation of labor—an interdependent web of strangers, siblings, animals, and nature—feels especially suited to a future that will be precarious for workers as well as the environment. In her fantastical, unsparing world, life is what the factory makes of it.

... a cool, self-controlled presentation tinged with a creeping surrealism ... What’s so startling about The Factory is the way Oyamada depicts the factory’s ascendance as a product of simple, placid acceptance. Despite the ghoulish creatures that prowl the margins of the novel, it’s really the specter of economic insecurity that provides The Factory with its generative anxiety ... The vagueness and matter-of-factness of Oyamada’s language has a clear purpose, increasing the disturbing sense of inevitability that pervades the story.

Oyamada can certainly write ... the translation by David Boyd is fluent and atmospheric, maintaining a sense that this is a Japanese dystopia, not just via the smattering of bento boxes and soba, but also in the way people interact in a sort of formalized informality ... more atmosphere than plot ... The difficulty of course is that a novel about emptiness can also come to seem empty ... Discomfiting and disconcerting, The Factory is short, clocking in at just over 100 pages. That’s probably just as well; nothing, even surreally random nothing, can go on for only so long. Having made her point, Oyamada brings the work to a rapid close.

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 ... There is an enclosed, purgatory-like feel to the setting ... Oyamada expertly weaves in a series of strange phenomena...creating an atmosphere of unease bordering on pernicious. But by refusing to give answers and instead letting the mundane and the uncanny blend together...Oyamada maximizes her puzzle. This nonpareil novel will leave readers reeling and beguiled.

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.