Takiji Kobayashi

Takiji Kobayashi (Odate, 1903 – Tokyo, 1933) was a Japanese writer associated with proletarian literature, a movement that in the 1920s and 1930s portrayed the struggles of workers and farmers against employers and the state. He is remembered above all for the short novel Kani Kōsen (The Crab Cannery Ship), published in 1929, and for his early and violent death at the hands of the state's political police.

He grew up in Otaru, on the island of Hokkaido, where his family settled when he was four. They were not wealthy, but an uncle paid for his schooling, and as a student he began writing and sending pieces to literary magazines. Economic hardship and the recession of the time drew him toward the labour movement. After graduating he worked at a bank branch in Otaru, a job he lost in 1929 after publishing The Absentee Landlord, an essay on the exploitation of tenant farmers in Hokkaido.

That same year Kani Kōsen appeared in the magazine Senki. Its story of a crew that rises against a cruel manager on a crab-canning ship was an immediate success and became a flagship of Japanese proletarian fiction. Earlier in 1929 his story March 15, 1928 had exposed police torture of detainees, which drew official hostility. Kobayashi joined the Communist Party, was arrested several times between 1930 and 1931, and went underground in 1932.

On 20 February 1933 he walked into a trap set in Akasaka after an informer had infiltrated the party. Witnesses later described torture; police announced that he had died of a heart attack, but his family found a badly bruised body, and no hospital would perform an autopsy. He was 29.

His legacy endures. In 2008 Kani Kōsen became an unexpected bestseller in Japan, driven by a newspaper debate and by young precarious workers who identified with its characters. The novel has been translated into many languages, and he is commemorated through monuments, a literary museum and walking routes in Otaru.