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. The book expresses a sense of pessimism from the beginning. 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. The work has no single protagonist, and the only named character, the superintendent Asakawa, is portrayed as an inhuman monster. The letter also shows the influence orthodox Marxism had on Kobayashi roughly two years after his reading of Das Kapital. 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 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. 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.

Kobayashi began writing the work late in 1928 and finished in March of the following year. The novel has been released in English as The Cannery Boat (1933), The Factory Ship (1973), and The Crab Cannery Ship (2013).

The book was banned by government censors, but not before selling 15,000 copies. In September of the same year, it was released as a standalone book by Senki Company. 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. Kani Kōsen ( 蟹工船, 'The Crab Cannery Ship') is a 1929 novel by Japanese author Takiji Kobayashi. The cover of the 2006 manga edition of Kani kōsen.

Cannery book