The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle - by Takiji Kobayashi (Paperback)

About the Book

This book contains translations of three novels by Takiji Kobayashi, a Communist organizer and proletarian writer of the pre WWII era. The novels The Crab Cannery ship, Yasuko, and Life of a Party Memberprovide important insights into the literature and

Book Synopsis

This collection introduces the work of Japan's foremost Marxist writer, Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933), to an English-speaking audience, providing access to a vibrant, dramatic, politically engaged side of Japanese literature that is seldom seen outside Japan. The volume presents a new translation of Takiji's fiercely anticapitalist Kani kōsen--a classic that became a runaway bestseller in Japan in 2008, nearly eight decades after its 1929 publication. It also offers the first-ever translations of Yasuko and Life of a Party Member, two outstanding works that unforgettably explore both the costs and fulfillments of revolutionary activism for men and women. The book features a comprehensive introduction by Komori Yōichi, a prominent Takiji scholar and professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo University.

Review Quotes

From time to time, as Japan has faced various postwar crises, popular interest in proletarian literature has revived. Now English readers have a chance to experience, in a lively translation, three representative works by Kobayashi, two of them translated for the first time. . . . Kobayashi was a very talented writer, not just an ideologue, and showed a flair for striking imagery . . . . It is the vividness of these images that makes the read a pleasure, despite the painfulness of many of the things described.-- "Japan Times"

The title piece of this volume is a timely and long awaited new translation of Kobayashi Takiji's 1929 novel [The Cannery Boat], the most influential literary work to emerge out of the so-called Proletarian Cultural Movement that was in operation for about a decade around 1930 ... Cipris has made a magnificent fist of bringing Kobayashi's words to life on the page for a modern readership.-- "Japan Studies"