The Crab-Canning Ship

In Germany, as noted here last week, Karl Marx's books are flying off the shelves. Now comes word that there's a hot new bestseller in Japan: the almost 80-year-old novel The Crab-Canning Ship, whose communist author Takiji Kobayashi was murdered by the imperial regime. A new manga version of the story is also selling briskly.

Here's an excerpt from an October 18 London Daily Telegraph report:

"Nearly eight decades after it was written by Takiji Kobayashi, a communist who was tortured to death for his political beliefs aged 29, its sales have leapt from a slow annual trickle of 5,000 to 507,000 so far this year, unexpectedly catapulting it to the top of the nation's bestseller lists.

"A 'manga' comic book depicting the same Marxist tale is also winning over young Japanese, with 200,000 copies sold in a year. Kosuke Maruo, editor at East Press, which publishes the manga version, said: 'The story succeeds in representing very vividly the situation of the so-called working poor today.

"'They cannot become happy and they cannot find the solution to their poverty, however hard they work. Young people who are forced to work for very low wages today may have a feeling that they are in a similar position to the crew of Kanikosen.'"

Two months before the Telegraph took note, the Japan Times covered the book's suddenly explosive sales:

"A book released nearly 80 years ago and considered a representative piece of proletarian literature is apparently striking a chord with young part-time workers amid growing income disparities and poverty in Japan. ... The pocket-size book had been republished but around February a Tokyo bookstore ran an advertisement that read, 'Working Poor?' following an article on the 75th anniversary of Kobayashi's death.

"Shinchosha Publishing Co. said that in a normal year around 5,000 copies of the book would be reprinted. But this year, it has already printed nearly 380,000 copies. The Tokyo publisher said people in their 20s account for about 30 percent of buyers."

Also in August, a workers' demonstration was themed around the Kobayashi book. "Now the whole world has become 'Crab-Canning Ship.'"

I had a hard time finding it because the title is different, but there is an English translation. The Factory Ship, translated by Frank Motofuji and published in 1973 by UNESCO and the University of Tokyo Press.

UPDATES: Additional posts about The Crab-Canning Ship are here, and here, and here.