Kobayashi Takiji wrote powerful and acclaimed works one after another during a few years between the late 1920s and mid 1930s, the height of the socialist movement in Japan. Especially as social reverberations from the Russian Revolution reached their homeland, Japanese who had experienced Western-style democracy during the Taish Period (1912-1926) gradually awoke to Marxist doctrine, began to oppose government policies of building a "wealthy nation and strong army"--the motto of the Meiji government's reform policies--and sought to liberate the masses. Of the many writers who joined the battle lines of the socialist movement, the author who stood in the middle of the fray and embodied the vitality of the uprising was Kobayashi Takiji.

Many of Kobayashi's works are set in Hokkaid, the new frontier opened by pioneering farmers during the Meiji Period (1868-1912). As one who had migrated to Hokkaid and had observed closely how the...