I heard about this book sometime last week I think. I’m not sure where, but probably from one of the blogs that I follow. It is a very interesting and curious phenomena: a book written in 1929 becomes suddenly very popular. I’m curious, and thinking about getting a copy.

Anyway, first up: an excellent introduction to the book and some theorizing on the background situation that might have contributed to the popularity from the interesting Néojaponisme blog. One of their contributors has translated (part of?) the first chapter, so you can get a flavor of that.

From the comments in that post, I clicked over to an entry at Takiji Library where they have a free manga version of the book available for download or online reading. That looks like it will be interesting to check out, so I downloaded the PDF version for later ebook train consumption.

Finally, I was curious whether Amazon was selling The Crabbing Boat, and sure enough, it is. This is the version from 1954 (I am digging that cool cover) and is a very reasonable 420 yen. The book is pretty highly rated with lots of positive reviews. I really like that Amazon will sell the book to me bundled with a manga version of the book that is aimed at College students, and claims that you can read it in 30 minutes. This is an interesting take on Cliff’s notes, but looks to be even more accessible. I never used Cliff’s notes myself because if there is a book to read, I’ll usually read it, but for Japanese novels the idea of a manga adaptation appeals to me.

I wanted to use another affiliate link to get the cover to show up on this post, but I need to sign up with the Japanese affiliate system to make links to amazon.co.jp products, so maybe that will wait until I have more free time and more links to make to Japanese stuff. Given the abysmally slow rate that I’ve been reading “Kafka by the Sea”, I don’t think that is likely to happen any time soon. 🙂