Western reviewers sometimes miss the fact that most characters and occurrences in a contemporary Japanese novel are accurate depictions of life. That’s why — as I discovered when I moved to Tokyo — authors like Haruki Murakami aren’t well regarded in Japan; they simply tell stories from everyday life. Yes, there’s a number of plot points, such as the final transformation of the narrator into a bird, that obviously are fantastic or surrealistic. Yet it’s always in the context of a perplexing or broken society; the surrealism stands in for the many emotions people cannot express in this world. Once aware that a novel like The Factory serves more realism than fantasy, I think readers (or maybe it’s just me?) may be disappointed that the book doesn’t draw its criticism out into the open. But that wouldn’t be very Japanese, would it?