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A review by fxdpts
The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle by Takiji Kobayashi
“The Crab Cannery Ship” is an impressive novel in its depiction of struggle and organic development of class consciousness, as well as its deep empathy. Of all the novels in this collection, this one best uses the “proletarian novel” format, where the entire crew of the ship is the protagonist. It does so without getting lost in individual personalities or an overwhelming number of workers (the workers in the engine room are not introduced until the ending).
“Yasuko” feels underdeveloped (it is only the first part of an unfinished work), but it is a good story. It switches between characters and settings rapidly, almost a bit too disjointed. It reads more like Les Misérables than the other two novels, almost separate vignettes of lower class misery rather than didactic and explicitly socialist.
“Life of a Party Member” is a lot of fun. There are parts that make organizing the factory and evading the police read like a heist story. Despite the narrator explaining his depersonalization necessary for the organizing he does, you also notice the author’s suffering in here. Kobayashi Takiji and many of his comrades were tortured by the Japanese Police due to their associations with the outlawed Japanese Communist Party and organized labor. This brutality informs every aspect of the narrator’s life and the author’s tendencies towards the urgency of the work and the depersonalization of organizing institutions. This also comes across after the failed bargaining effort in “The Crab Cannery Ship.” I did find the brevity of one conversation curious: the contradiction in organizing against worker dismissal from a factory making supplies for the war effort. Anti-war themes are expressed throughout, so I don’t know if this was from lack of development of these ideas by the circles the author was in or that these ideas would be further expressed in later parts of the novel.
Either way, this is a great view into early socialism and pretty readable and enjoyable even for work that’s quite didactic.
“Yasuko” feels underdeveloped (it is only the first part of an unfinished work), but it is a good story. It switches between characters and settings rapidly, almost a bit too disjointed. It reads more like Les Misérables than the other two novels, almost separate vignettes of lower class misery rather than didactic and explicitly socialist.
“Life of a Party Member” is a lot of fun. There are parts that make organizing the factory and evading the police read like a heist story. Despite the narrator explaining his depersonalization necessary for the organizing he does, you also notice the author’s suffering in here. Kobayashi Takiji and many of his comrades were tortured by the Japanese Police due to their associations with the outlawed Japanese Communist Party and organized labor. This brutality informs every aspect of the narrator’s life and the author’s tendencies towards the urgency of the work and the depersonalization of organizing institutions. This also comes across after the failed bargaining effort in “The Crab Cannery Ship.” I did find the brevity of one conversation curious: the contradiction in organizing against worker dismissal from a factory making supplies for the war effort. Anti-war themes are expressed throughout, so I don’t know if this was from lack of development of these ideas by the circles the author was in or that these ideas would be further expressed in later parts of the novel.
Either way, this is a great view into early socialism and pretty readable and enjoyable even for work that’s quite didactic.