Review of The Crab Cannery Ship (1929)
Kobayashi Takiji (writer).
Read in 2026.
Read in Björn Wada’s Swedish translation.
Four hundred men find themselves afloat in a factory where neither the regulations of the sea nor those of the land apply. They set out from Hakodate, on the Japanese colony of Hokkaidō, but their repurposed ship heads for Soviet waters off Kamchatka. The Japanese navy’s imperial interests are entwined with those of the corporation. Aboard, even the captain takes orders from the foreman.
Freezing fishermen dump their loads of skittering crabs on the storm-wracked deck above. After their shift, factory workers sick with beriberi drop into their bunks in the “shitcave”, a 200-man dormitory. They dream of women, revenge, and eventually, revolution.
The author, born shortly before the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, would be tortured to death at age 29 shortly after the 1931–1932 invasion of Manchuria that would lead to WW2. His greatest novel is a communist melodrama, wary of propaganda but still naïve about what the Soviet Union was becoming. Even so, it’s an amazing picture of Japanese fascism.
Serialized in a magazine, the novel’s structure is flawed: The plot and characters are underdeveloped in favour of freewheeling literary formalism, weaving second-hand anecdotes and the inner monologues of the collective into the narrative. Given the setting, it’s hard to fault the author for framing the few women as sex objects. It is more surprising that the ending is barely a sketch, and that the actual work performed on the ship is not described. You will learn more about the contemporary social construction of homosexual hebephilia than you will about crabs. You will learn nothing about canning.
It is the striking prose that saves this maritime Japanese The Jungle (1905). Wada’s translation is successful. Without transferring all the Japanese idioms into Swedish, he conveys the liveliness and the pathos of Kobayashi’s snapshot.