Now at Néojaponisme: my translation of the first chapter of Kanikōsen 蟹工船 ("The Crab Factory Ship", a.k.a. "The Factory Ship", a.k.a. "The Cannery Ship", but we decided to go with the Japanese title since it's become such a fad).

Kanikōsen is a proletarian novel by KOBAYASHI Takiji about folks on, well, a crab cannery ship. They toil ceaselessly in subhuman conditions (worse than Nakameguro even—I kid, I kid!) for their upper-class bosses, and get little in return. Many people in Japan, especially the young and "working poor" (a recent loanword to Japanese), see the book as an allegory for their lives..