New Marxist book tops Japan's best seller list
Updated
A Marxist novel written in 1929 has spent the last few months on top of the best seller list in Japan. It tells the story of a crew on a crab boat working in harsh conditions under a sadistic captain. The book was re-released this year with a marketing campaign linking it to the plight of the working poor.
Presenter: Joanna McCarthy
Speaker: Dr Barbara Hartley, lecturer in Japanese literature at the University of Tasmania.
HARTLEY: Well this book which is called "Crab Factory Boat" is about a large crabbing boat that operates in the freezing cold waters north of Okido, which is the northern most island of Japan and south of the Kumchaka Peninsula which is that part of Russia that is very close to Alaska.
And the author whose name is Kobiashi Takachi was the well known proloteriat left wing writer and the story gives us detail of the huge amounts of money that were made by the company and the superintendent operating the boat and at the same time, the brutal working conditions of the labourers working on the boat.
So while the management are sitting at the top of the boat enjoying every privilege. They are warm, they have got delicious food and very pleasant living conditions, the men are confined to the hold of the boat, where there is the stench of the crabs, freezing cold conditions, lack of sanitation and all that sort of thing is making life very unbearable.
McCARTHY: And indeed now, more than 75 years after it was first published, it is a best seller. Why has it resonated with the Japanese people so much today?
HARTLEY: Well, it seems to be me. Well first of all, we know that Japan enjoyed very favourable economic conditions for about three decades from 1960 or so. Then when Japan entered the 1990s, there were quite serious problems with the economy. So people in Japan, before 1990, like to think that there was no poverty in Japan and that everyone belonged to the middle class. But that became much more difficult to sustain, after the collapse. They call it the bubble economy.
So many people in Japan now are doing it very, very tough economically. There's increasing numbers of people who fall into the category of the working poor. So these are people who inspite of the fact that they work very hard, they often work in very difficult conditions, actually do not earn enough money to support themselves or their families.
Now if you go back to that time of economic success for Japan, people probably found it difficult to understand the plight of the workers featured in the novel. But more and more people today are likely to feel sympathy, particularly when, and I think it's the same in most industrialised countries, while you have got some people struggling to survive, others are continuing to have a very privileged life.
McCARTHY: And Barbara Hartley, the author himself had such a fascinating life story. How has this added to the whole mythology that exists around the novel today?
HARTLEY : Well Kobiashi, the author, was actually murdered in police custody in 1933, when he was aged 30 years, so images of his brutalised body actually circulated after his death, and these are often still featured in books on left wing working class literature in Japan. So there is definitely a mystique surrounding his death. But I also think that Japan was a country that clearly took a wrong path in the 1930s, with the invasion of China, and again in the 1940s, with the attack on Pearl Harbour. And so I think for many people Kobiashi represents the lost potential of Japan, which could have taken a much more productive road with a different leadership in the 1930s and the 1940s.
McCARTHY: And the novel has also proved a big hit with younger readers today. Did that surprise you?
HARTLEY: Well actually, not at all. There has been a particular pressure on young people, who as far as I can see, have really taken the full brunt of the economic turn down and they have been severely criticised for not working in the way that previous generations did. And it would seem that for an increasing number of young people in Japan, the future is looking increasingly bleak.
McCARTHY: And finally Barbara Hartley, what affect do you think the success of this novel will have on contemporary Japanese writers today?
HARTLEY: Well, Japanese writers today deal with a huge range of issues. And in Japan, there are even writers, particularly young people, who write novels on their mobile phones and reading novels on mobile phones has become very popular. But there are also many Japanese writers today who are writing very confronting stories about the injustices in Japanese society and what we might call the underside of Japanese society. So I'm not sure that the success of the Crab Factory Boat will actually influence too many people to change their writing style, but I'm sure that there are many, many people and I'm one of those people who are quite happy that the novel is enjoying this renewed success and that the author is getting the breadth of readership that he deserves.
