Lady Joker: Volume 2: The Million Copy Bestselling 'Masterpiece of Japanese Crime Fiction'

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This includes those of Shiroyama, who is abducted and taken to a snowy mountain location. His interaction with the fellow board members of Hinode Beer are also shown We also follow members of the police authorities, primarily the MPD; and with the attention that the disappearance of such a prominent businessman man our attention is drawn to the eager members of staff of the newspaper Toho News.

Lady Joker, Volume Two by Kaoru Takamura | Goodreads

Like Ellroy’s American Tabloid and Carr’s The Alienist, the book uses crime as a prism to examine dynamic periods of social history . . . Takamura’s blistering indictment of capitalism, corporate corruption and the alienation felt by characters on both sides of the law from institutions they once believed would protect them resonates surprisingly with American culture.” Admirers of intricate crime fiction, which both engages the intellect and offers insights into the hidden parts of a society, will hope for further translations of this gifted author’s work.”

Centered around an extortion case involving a beer company, Lady Joker would ordinarily be categorized in the crime or mystery novel genre, yet the book deserves to be called an exemplary literary work that depicts contemporary society . . . A magnum opus . . . It requires extraordinary skill to fully depict the ambivalence of Japanese society, in all its detail. Reading Lady Joker together with James Ellroy’s American Tabloid and the drama behind the Kennedy assassination serves as an intriguing comparison. Viewing a society through the lens of a crime is like examining a disease or a corpse to get at the person: it exposes the foundations of human existence.”

Lady Joker: Volume 2: The Million Copy Bestselling

I'm also a little lost on where this book falls. It's set in the 90s so it feels like I could now place it under historical fiction but at the time of original publication (1997 I think), it would be deemed fiction? It's not really a thriller considering the incident wasn't all that thrilling. There's no mystery to the reader either, only to the police and media. Hallelujah! Inspired by the real-life, still unsolved Glico-Morinaga kidnapping and extortion case that led to the nationwide hunt for ‘The Monster with Twenty-one Faces,’ Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker is at last available in translation; epic in its scale and vision, yet gripping from first to last, this is one of the great masterpieces of Japanese crime fiction and one of the must-read books of this or any year.”

Lady Joker, Vol. 2

Finally, a note on translation. I’ve heard it said that translators’ names should be on the cover, and that honor is well deserved here. Iida and Powell prove that English holds a world of words that showcase beauty, depth and highly specific meanings—far from the banal, undifferentiated language we native speakers oft accuse it of being. The English language edition of Lady Joker shows that translation is a high art form worthy of our deep respect and appreciation—especially given the need to bring Takamura’s industry-specific terminology and precision to life. My only gripe is that the female characters were relegated to minor roles as “the wife” or “the secretary”. This however may be a reflection of corporate life in Japan in the 90s where women did not have roles in executive. One of my gripes about the Japanese fiction we read is it is often simply weird – little plot in favour of portrayals of outsiders. Yes, there are outsiders in Lady Joker but their outsider status and their being apart from the corporate world is not the whole plot. I hope to read more Japanese fiction where this is the case. Mysterious and multilayered, [ Lady Joker] gives readers extortion and kidnapping as it critiques the dark corners of Japanese society and the human experience.” The premise sounded so good - a plan to extort money out of a beer corporation - and I was glued to the book for about the first third of it. But once it moved away from the “Lady Joker” group who commit the crime and focused on the victim of the crime, the press, and the police - it just became very boring and moved painfully slow. I can’t allow myself to not finish a book (unless it’s completely terrible) - so I continued to work my way through it although it took way longer than it should have because I just kept getting bored. Eventually I started to speed read through it just to get it done. PDF / EPUB File Name: Lady_Joker_Volume_2_-_Kaoru_Takamura.pdf, Lady_Joker_Volume_2_-_Kaoru_Takamura.epub