Translated Kanikōsen

Abstract

Kanikōsen was translated into English and published in America and Britain in 1933. The original Japanese version had been written by Takiji Kobayashi and published in 1929.The English version’s tittle was The Cannery Boat by Takiji Kobayashi, and Other Japanese Short Stories. But its translator’s name was not written anywhere in the book.
Unexpectedly, the name was revealed in a Japanese newspaper’s article reporting the roundup of the Japanese Communist Party members in 1934. It was William Maxwell Bickerton that translated Kanikōsen. He was British born and raised in New Zealand and was teaching English at Dai-ichi High School and other colleges in Tokyo. According to the article he was arrested under the Peace Preservation Law by the Tokkō (the Special Higher Police) on suspicion of giving money to the Japanese Communist Party. He told the police about his translation during the harsh investigation.
It was very rare for Japanese modern novels to be translated and published in foreign countries before the World War II. At that time, modern Japanese literature was hardly known in the West, though The Tale of Genji were translated into English in the 1925, which drew praises from many European literary people including Virginia Woolf and other modernists.
Why and how Kanikōsen was translated and published abroad is the theme of this paper. It inevitably has relation to the context of the world politics in the 1930s, especially of the rise of the Communist Movements in Japan and the West. For instance, one of the American Communist leaders, Michael Gold, a Proletarian writer himself, helped Bickerton publish his translation. This kind of political situation in the 1930s, rather than the literary quality and values of the work itself, supposedly urged the overseas translation and publication of the Kobayashi’s proletarian work.