When Karl Marx alerted economists to the “the knell of capitalist private property” he probably didn’t imagine the phrase cropping-up as a speech bubble in a comic strip for Japanese commuters.

But across the world’s second biggest economy, bookstores from Hiroshima to Hokkaido are preparing for what they expect to be the publishing phenomenon of the year: Das Kapital – the manga version.

The comic, which goes on sale early next month, plays into a growing fascination among Japan’s hard-working labour force with socialist literature and joins a collection of increasingly fierce literary critiques of the global capitalist system.

In recent decades, while Japan Inc was still delivering collective prosperity to the nation, public criticism of companies has been muted. Unions were weak and acquiescent. But now, as the country sinks into its second recession in seven year, the sackings begin and the gap widens between rich and poor, a growing number of Japanese believe the problem lies with capitalism itself.

The ambitious comic rendering of Das Kapital is designed to parcel the complex economic theories of Marx’s hefty original in a format which Japanese adore digesting their information from; it will also be compressed into a size that can be slipped discretely into a Chanel evening bag, or slid into the top drawer of a desk when the bosses are looking. A sneak preview given to The Times reveals that Marx’s central themes are relayed in the comic via a cast of suitably down-trodden workers.

Japanese publishers have historically used cartoons to explain thorny diplomatic relations with China, advanced wine-tasting and even the spread of bird flu: the manga version of Das Kapital takes on even the toughest concepts thrown up in the original, from “commodity fetishism” to the precise process by which “the expropriators are expropriated”.

The comic is expected to sell tens of thousands of copies in its first weeks on sale, but is up against stiff competition: anti-capitalist books are the hottest sellers in capitalist Japan at the moment, and it will take something extraordinary to beat the sales of Hideki Mitani’s “Greedy Capitalism and the Self Destructiveness of Wall Street.”

A former Goldman Sachs high-flyer, Mr Mitani now vigorously deplores the destruction of Japanese business values on the altar of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and describes Wall Street itself as one of Dante’s circles of hell. Phrases like “unbridled mammonism” and “uncontrolled greed” abound in his work. Japanese readers, meanwhile, are lapping it up, and the book has become the fastest-selling non-fiction title for many years.

The dramatic shift to the left in Japanese literary tastes has even revived domestic socialist tracts of the 1930s: one of the strongest selling books of the year, at nearly half a million copies, is Kanikosen - a savagely bleak, novel depicting violence, exploitation and revolution aboard a crabmeat canning ship.

The book has somehow pinched a nerve in 21st Century Japan. When Kanikosen was reprinted earlier this year, Tokyo’s largest bookshop put a poster at the front of the store reading: “Revival of the book that describes the cruel labour environment of the past: an environment similar to that of the current working poor in 2008.”

Daisuke Asao, a senior officer in the National Confederation of Trades Unions, said of Japan’s resurgent interest in socialist literature: “the situation of those labourers in the book is very similar to modern temporary workers: the unpredictable contracts, the working under heavy supervision, violence from supervisors, the widespread sexual harassment and the pressure against unionisation are all things that modern Japanese recognise every day."

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