‘The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle’ by Takiji Kobayashi (Review)

On several occasions in recent months, I’ve looked at the aesthetic side of Japanese literature during the interwar period, but as some of you may know, a very different style of writing also rose to prominence at this time. The years between 1925 and 1935 were known as the ‘red decade’, with proletarian literature rising gloriously before being brutally stamped out as the country turned once again towards militarism. Out of all the writers engaged in this endeavour, one man stood out, and one of his works has become a standard bearer for the genre as a whole – so it’s probably about time that I reviewed it, then. ***** Takiji Kobayashi is the best known of the proletarian writers working in the 1920s and 30s, and his undoubted masterpiece is the short novel Kani kōsen (The Crab Cannery Ship). As translator Željko Cipriš explains, the novel suddenly reemerged as a bestseller in 2008, bringing attention to a story from almost eighty years earlier, with the gloomy economic situation in…