Lady Joker: Volume 1: The Million Copy Bestselling 'Masterpiece of Japanese Crime Fiction'

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As Noguchi had explained to Okamura at the time: "My employment has become a problem for the company". As Monoi notes, years later when they do organize themselves into a group with a very specific agenda: "We sure are a motley crew". Through the working class, and executives, the police force and media, author Kaoru Takamura brings to her readers a Japan which is complicated and often corrupt. The disenfranchised working class who commit a crime seem no better (or worse) than the corporate executives who commit crimes in their own, more subtle, ways.”

A swarm of characters, an unorthodox structure, and slow-moving, ultimately irresistible suspense distinguish Lady Joker . . .Like some novels by James Ellroy and Marlon James, Lady Joker is wildly ambitious in scope.” The book starts with a letter from Seiji Okamura to the Hinode Beer Company written in June 1947. He was one of forty employees who resigned from the company’s Kanagawa factory. It transpires in his letter that he is a member of the Baraku people - meaning Hamlet people who are a caste-like minority and the largest discriminated against population in Japan. The letter alleges that these employees received discrimination for being at the bottom of the traditional social herirachy and also for their attempts to have union recognition. We then encounter the eldderly Monoi and his friends from the racecourse including Yo-Chan - a Zainichi (Korean), Nunokawa who struggles through life with a mentally handicapped teenage daughter, and a police sergeant called Handa. Each feels that they have been left neglected within modern Japanese society. Together they devise a plan to kidnap the president and CEO of Hinode - Kyosuke Shiroyama and then hold the company to ransom. Takamura was born in Osaka in 1953. After graduating from International Christian University, she worked for a trading company, and did not start writing until her 30s. [1] [2] Career [ edit ] Noma Literary Prize Past Winning Works]. Kodansha (in Japanese). Archived from the original on December 15, 2018 . Retrieved December 15, 2018.

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.”

Like Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Takamura’s sprawling saga situates its crime plot in the context of corruption . . . A complex work of stunning breadth and depth by a master of the genre.” Challenging but rewarding, Lady Joker is a panoramic view of late 20th-century Japanese society, rife with social injustice and corporate corruption: a fascinating slow burn of a book, detailed, complex and immersive." - Laura Wilson, The GuardianThe symbols used in this slot are purely card based and that might bring a certain monotonousness to the proceedings. This is primarily because many slots try to use card symbols as ‘fillers’, while Lady Joker bases its entire range of gameplay around these cards. 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.” A novel that portrays withdevastating immensityhow those on the dark fringes of society can be consumed by the darkness of their own hearts.” In 1993 Takamura's mystery novel Mākusu no yama ( マークスの山, Marks' Mountain), about a boy who survives his parents' suicide and grows up to be a psychopathic serial killer, won the Naoki Prize as well as Takamura's second consecutive Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize. [1] [4] The book sold more than a million copies. [5] It was later adapted into a 1995 Yoichi Sai film and a 2010 Wowow television drama. [6] By the mid-1990s Takamura was seen as the "Queen of Mysteries", but in 1997, after completing a fictionalized account of the Glico Morinaga case titled Redi joka ( レディ・ジョーカー, Lady Joker), she changed the focus of her writing from mystery novels to literary fiction. [7] Lady Joker was later adapted into the 2004 Hideyuki Hirayama film Lady Joker and a 2013 Wowow television drama. [8]

One of Japan’s great modern masters, Kaoru Takamura, makes her English-language debut with this two-volume publication of her magnum opus. The contrast to the lives of the other individuals -- those that make up the 'Lady Joker'-group, as they then call themselves --, which involve more personal struggle, is also intriguing as they have largely not benefitted nearly as much from the corporate success story of Japan Inc. over these decades. a b c "Authors: Kaoru Takamura". Books from Japan. Archived from the original on December 15, 2018 . Retrieved December 13, 2018. Much of the second half of this part of the novel is focused on the procedural -- police, press, and also corporate --, detail that some might find slow but that is also revealing about the Japan of those times, and offers a great deal in this regard. Takamura’s challenging, genre-confounding epic offers a sweeping view of contemporary Japan in all its complexity.”As is, it naturally feels rather incomplete -- but there's enough here to satisfy, a large canvas that, even if without resolutions, offers a thoroughly engaging read.