[5] 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.

[6] Kobayashi considered his use of a collective protagonist rather than a singular hero was a step forward in the creation of a proletarian literature,[4] a claim he made in a letter to his mentor Korehito Kurahara immediately upon completion of the work.

[4] 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;[4] factory hands in their early teens who have been abandoned by poverty-stricken parents;[4] and students who have been tricked into believing that ship work is attractive summer employment.

[10] Literary historian and critic Donald Keene wrote that the work "succeeds not because of its message, nor because of its confident appraisal of the future, but because of the vivid, believable details of life aboard the ship.

"[10] Keene praised the story's unflinching portrayal of sexual violence by the older fishermen against their younger comrades[11] and refusal to set any one figure up as a "worker-hero".