Author(s): Hiroko Oyamada

Novel | Translated fiction | Japan

The English-language debut of one of the most powerfully strange young voices in Japan. Told in three alternating first-person narratives, The Factory casts a vivid--if sometimes surreal--portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of modern life.

Beyond the town, there is the factory. Beyond the factory, there is nothing.

Within the sprawling industrial complex, three new employees are each assigned a department. There, each must focuses on a specific task: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. As they grow accustomed to the routine and co-workers, their lives 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 Beckett and unexpected moments of creeping humour, The Factory is a vivid, and sometimes surreal, portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of the modern workplace.

Review: Strangely chilling * New York Times *
A stirring portrait of modern work-life culture * TIME Magazine *
[A] stellar, mind-bending debut * Publishers Weekly *

Author Biography: Born in Hiroshima in 1983, HIROKO OYAMADA is the author of The Factory - winner of the Shincho Prize for New Writers - and The Hole, for which she won Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Prize, and Weasels in the Attic.

DAVID BOYD is an award-winning translator, and Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina. He has translated fiction by Izumi Suzuki, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa and Kanoko Okamoto, among others, and is translating the novels of Mieko Kawkami alongside Sam Bett.