like a Eurasian prostitute. Undoubtedly a feeling of racial inferiority existed and still exists in Japan, and Tanizaki’s novel was an attempt to combat it, rather than a simple description. His characters, when compared with those in Of Human Bondage, lack complexity and depth, but this is true, as I have indicated, of almost all Japanese literary personages.
Problems of another sort were treated by writers of the so-called proletarian literature, who flourished especially in the 1920’s. The most famous work of this school of writing was The Crab-Canning Boat (1929), by Kobayashi Takiji (1903–33). This is the account of a voyage to the coast of Kamchatka by a small combination fishing and canning boat fleet. There is very little plot, and no attempt at characterization, in The Crab-Canning Boat, but the descriptions of the conditions under which the men live are extremely vivid. Among the crew are some students, who are unaccustomed both to the disagreeable work and to the uncouth sailors among whom they live. The officers and petty officers of the ship are fiendish and take sadistic delight in inflicting punishment on the crew, especially the students. The company which sends them out is represented as an organization of monsters. When, then, the ship comes in contact with a party of charming Soviet subjects, and a Japanese-speaking Chinese communicated the glad tidings of Marxism, it spreads with powerful effect among the crew.
If the Communist propaganda in such works as The Crab-Canning Boat seems excessively crude, it should be remembered that it was about the same time that in America such works as Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935) were written. This play features a scene in which a young man asks for bread and is given a copy of the Communist Manifesto which, he is told, is as necessary for his soul. Indeed, the similarities between almost any aspect of Japanese literature produced between 1900
