is a 1929 novel by Japanese author Takiji Kobayashi. Overview Kani Kōsen is a proletarian novel by Takiji Kobayashi that was first serialized in the May and June 1929 issues of the communist literary magazine Senki. In September of the same year, it was released as a standalone book by Senki Company. The book was banned by government censors, but not before selling 15,000 copies. The novel has been released in English as The Cannery Boat (1933), The Factory Ship (1973), and The Crab Cannery Ship (2013). Background Kobayashi began writing the work late in 1928 and finished in March of the following year. It was not based on any personal experiences of the author, but was influenced by Yoshiki Hayama's semi-autobiographical novel Umi ni Ikuru Hitobito. The work's immediate inspiration came from Kobayashi's reading of a newspaper's description of floating crab cannery workers who had been treated brutally and sued their captain on their return to shore. Kobayashi considered his use of a collective protagonist rather than a singular hero was a step forward in the creation of a proletarian literature, a claim he made in a letter to his mentor Korehito Kurahara immediately upon completion of the work. The letter also shows the influence orthodox Marxism had on Kobayashi roughly two years after his reading of Das Kapital. Plot The work has no single protagonist, and the only named character, the superintendent Asakawa, is portrayed as an inhuman monster. The other characters are various groups of oppressed people: fishermen who began as impoverished farmers and plan on using their earnings to rehabilitate their farms, but wind up resorting to drinking and whoring in Hakodate and Otaru; factory hands in their early teens who have been abandoned by poverty-stricken parents; and students who have been tricked into believing that ship work is attractive summer employment. Themes The book expresses a sense of pessimism from the beginning. This extends from the opening remarks to the description of Hakodate harbor as being filled with refuse to the comparison of smaller boats to insects. Reception Kani Kōsen sold well enough that 15,000 copies were in circulation before it was banned. Abridged versions that removed politically incorrect content continued to be sold after the book was banned, but the uncut version was not reprinted until 1948. In 2008 it became one of the best-selling novels in Japan, selling around five hundred thousand copies.