Japan Navigator

The last few weeks, in bookshops here in Japan, my eye was struck by stacks of red-covered paperbacks, piled up high in the bestseller section. On closer inspection, the title of those books turned out to be Kanikosen (“The Factory Ship”), what I remembered from Donald Keene’s monumental history of Japanese modern literature Dawn to the West as a “proletarian” novel from 80 years ago… Why the sudden popularity of this book? I wondered.

Yesterday I noticed Kanikosen was also listed on the list of top 36 products from the first half of 2008 as compiled by the Nikkei Marketing Journal (read an interesting article about this list on the website Clast). Apparently, over 300,000 copies of Kanikosen have been sold in recent months… although the publisher, Shinchosha, only expected a run of 7,000 copies to commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the death of the author, Kobayashi Takiji. A manga with the story of the novel was also published.

Again why the sudden popularity? How can a novel from 1929 become a bestseller in 2008?

Let’s first see what the book is about. As Donald Keene writes in Dawn to the West:

The Factory Ship describes different groups of men aboard a crab cannery vessel operating off the Kamchatka coast: fishermen, factory hands, and students who have been tricked into supposing work aboard the ship was a desirable summer employment.

“Desirable employment” is indeed far from the truth, catching and canning crabs turns out to be a viciously hard job, also because of the cruelty of the superintendent, Asakawa, who is a veritable monster. The workers finally join forces to fight their exploitation. The novel was based on a true story, by the way, the author documented himself in great detail.

Author of this novel was Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933). Kobayashi was born in Otaru and after working in a bank and dabbling in literature, became increasingly interested in Marx and started to try his hand at “proletarian” fiction. The Factory Ship was his best novel – he only wrote one other novel, The Absentee Landlord, besides short stories and essays, as he died in prison at the age of only 30. It was a bad time for freedom of expression in Japan: the Japanese army had just invaded Manchuria and at the home front persons with “communist sympathies” were considered dangerous to the State.

Now the link with today and the mystery of the sudden popularity of this dark tale.

Impoverished people with no fixed job are hired at low wages.

That is how the key situation in the novel could be described. And this has struck a chord with today’s working poor, the modern part-time workers, as is clear from a look around the Japanese web, where a lot has been written about the novel’s sudden popularity (also this article in the Asahi).

Once a model middle-class society, in Japan the gap between rich and poor is getting wider. It is often difficult for young people to land a stable, full-time job, because companies prefer to use part-timers to save on salary costs and for more flexibility in these times of harsh global competition. These part-timers not only have to cope with job insecurity, but in contrast to the laws in The Netherlands and (probably) most other EU countries where temps and full-time employees must be treated equally, in Japan they get lower salaries, no pension and no social security or insurance. In short, if they loose their job, they are lost in the desert, so to speak – like the men of The Factory Ship.

That is the sad solution to the mystery of the sudden bestseller status of The Factory Ship.