Senkyūhyaku nijū hachinen sangatsu jūgo nichi

Senkyūhyaku nijūhachinen sangatsu jūgo nichi, which translates to "The Fifteenth of March, 1928," is a significant work by Kobayashi Takiji. This story, published in 1928, was inspired by a national police crackdown and recorded local events related to it. Kobayashi Takiji was a prominent writer of the proletarian literary movement in pre-World War II Japan. His intimate knowledge of police brutality, stemming from his own arrest, informed this work. Along with other stories like Kani-kōsen (“The Cannery Boat”), this piece established Kobayashi as a leading proletarian writer. His literary contributions lie in his use of controlled realism to express anger over social injustice, aiming to elevate political propaganda through literary merit.1