The Crab Cannery Ship — Summary and Characters
Worked to death, the crew rises
- Author
- Kobayashi Takiji
- Published
- May 1929
- First appeared in
- Senki
- Form
- Novel
- Genres
- Social
- Psychological
- Length
- 61,705 characters
- Reading time
- About 2 hr 3 min
- Orthography
- Modern script and kana
About this work
The novella Kobayashi Takiji published in the magazine Senki in 1929. Aboard the Hakkō Maru, a factory ship catching and canning crab off Kamchatka, labourers worked past the point of death under a superintendent's violence slowly come together and stand up. It has no individual protagonist, presenting the workers instead as "we," and its attack on the collusion of capital with state power keeps it in print as the classic of Japanese proletarian literature.
Summary
The crab cannery ship Hakkō Maru sets out for the fishing grounds off Kamchatka with several hundred fishermen and hands aboard. Under the savage violence of the superintendent Asakawa, the men are forced into long hours in filthy conditions; dysentery spreads, and the sick die without proper care. In this hopeless place with no way out, the fishermen slowly come to see their own position for what it is, partly through contact with Russians. At one point, unable to bear the conditions any longer, they strike for the first time — but the superintendent calls in a destroyer of the Imperial Navy, the strike is put down, and the ringleaders are handed over. Made to see that state power stands on the side of capital, the workers still do not give in; holding to what they have learned about acting together, they rise a second time in sabotage. This time they succeed in outwitting the superintendent, and when the season ends and the ship returns to port, the men scatter across the country carrying the experience of a new struggle with them.
Characters
- The fishermen The nearly two hundred labourers aboard the Hakkō Maru — ruined peasants from the northeast, drifters from the mines and the labour barracks. The collective that is the real protagonist of the story
- The hands Boys of fourteen and fifteen packed into the hold, from the Hakodate slums and from Nanbu and Akita
- Asakawa The superintendent of the crab cannery ship Hakkō Maru. Club and pistol in hand, he justifies every kind of violence in the name of the Japanese Empire
- The former student A Tokyo student tricked aboard by a labour agent. He works out how the men are to keep in touch
- The stammering fisherman At the wake for a shipmate he says that Yamada was killed, and leads the call for the strike
- The captain The nominal head of the ship. Since the company only charters the vessel he has no authority at all before the superintendent — a mere signboard
Chapter-by-chapter synopsis
The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).
- 1. About This Work
- 2. Main Characters
- 3. Main Supporting Characters
- 4. Setting Sail — “Hey — We're Off to Hell!”
- 5. The Chichibu Maru's SOS, and a Hand Goes Missing
- 6. The Sudden Squall, and the Russians' Words
- 7. Prizes and the “Branding” — Killed Little by Little
- 8. The Night of the Burial at Sea, and the First Sabotage
- 9. The Strike
- 10. The Destroyer, and “Once More!”
- 11. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing
The opening (original text)
"Hey — we're off to hell!" The two of them were leaning on the deck rail, looking at the town of Hakodate, stretched out like a snail putting out its neck and holding the sea in its arms. — The fisherman spat out with his saliva the cigarette he had smoked down to his fingers.
The Crab Cannery Ship by Kobayashi Takiji (Aozora Bunko)
The ending (original text)
"Right — once more!" And they rose to their feet. — Once more! Postscript Let me add two or three things about what came afterwards. 1. That the second sabotage, done properly this time, succeeded beautifully. That the superintendent, who had never thought it could happen, ran wildly for the wireless room and then came to a dead stop before the door, not knowing what to do. 2. That when the season ended and they came back into Hakodate, the Hakkō Maru was not the only ship on which there had been sabotage and strikes. That pamphlets of "red propaganda" came off two or three other ships. 3. That the company then cut the superintendent and the head of the hands loose "without mercy" and without a penny of consolation money, on the ground that they had allowed so disgraceful a thing as a strike during the season and had gravely affected the yield. 4. And that, carrying with them the great experience they had come to know for the first time — organization, struggle — the fishermen and the young hands went out from the gate of the police station into every kind of working life. — This piece is one page of "a history of the invasion of capitalism into the colonies." (30 March 1929)
The Crab Cannery Ship by Kobayashi Takiji (Aozora Bunko)
Famous passages
“Hey, we're headed for hell!”
The opening cry, thrown out in dialect just as spoken. By flatly calling the crab cannery ship they are about to board “hell,” the story of brutal labor rises up from the very first line.
And they rose to their feet again. — Once more!
The closing, after their first uprising has been crushed, as they move toward a second act of sabotage. A short line, cut through with a dash, thrusts forward their will to rise again.
Read the original
The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.
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