by DOUG ENAA GREENE
Striking railway workers, led by the Japan Communist Party. PHOTO/Tim Shorrock
The stories of Japanese communist Takiji Kobayashi represent the best of proletarian literature.
n 2008 one of the best-selling novels in Japan was an eighty-year-old novel: Kanikosen (Crab Cannery Ship) by the communist author Takiji Kobayashi.The book is a story about a crew of fishermen who rebel against the wretched working conditions on a Japanese crabbing ship by going on strike and attempting to take over their ship.
Amid the global financial crisis, the novel, previously selling a moderate five thousand copies per year shot up to sales of five hundred thousand. Four new manga versions were also produced, and in 2009 Japanese director Hiroyuki Tanaka (Sabu) made a film based on the novel. Kobayashi’s work touched a nerve in contemporary Japan, plagued by growing inequality, insecurity, and the effects of a two-decade economic slump. Kanikosen laid bare not only the grueling reality of capitalism, but also the possibility of united resistance by workers.
Although Kobayashi’s Crab Cannery Ship has been in English translation since 1933 (albeit as an incomplete text), it has long been out of print. But two years ago a new collection, translated by Zeljko Cripis into sharp, vivid prose, was published by University of Hawaii Press. The volume contains not only the full Crab Cannery Ship, but also Yasuko and Life of a Party Member (both in English for the first time).
Kobayashi and the Japanese Left
Takiji Kobayashi was born in 1903 in the village of Shimokawazoi in northern Japan. His father was a small landowner, but an uncle had lost the family fortune in a failed business venture. In 1907 Kobayashi and his family moved to Otaru on the northern island of Hokkaido. Kobayashi worked at his uncle’s bakery during elementary school, moving on to the municipal Commercial School and later the Otaru Higher School of Commerce, where he graduated in 1924.
At university Kobayashi became aware of his family’s contradictory class position as former landowners and farmers, and he came to identify with oppressed factory workers and farmers. The class struggles spurred by the Meiji Restoration and the negative effects of capitalist modernization would inform Kobayashi’s greatest stories.
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