Lady Joker: Volume 1
*THE JAPANESE CRIME CLASSIC – ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD*
‘One of the great masterpieces of Japanese crime fiction and one of the must-read books of this or any year’ David Peace
Tokyo, 1995. Five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on horses. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives, but together they represent the social struggles and griefs of post-War Japan: a poorly socialized genius stuck working as a welder; a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder; a Zainichi Korean banker sick of being ostracized for his ethnicity; a struggling single dad of a teenage girl with Down syndrome. The fifth man bringing them all together is an elderly drugstore owner grieving his grandson, who has died suspiciously.
Intent on revenge against a society that values corporate behemoths more than human life, the five conspirators decide to carry out a heist: kidnap the CEO of Japan’s largest beer conglomerate and extract blood money from the company’s corrupt financiers.
Inspired by the unsolved true-crime kidnapping case perpetrated by “the Monster with 21 Faces,” Lady Joker has become a cultural touchstone since its 1997 publication, acknowledged as the magnum opus by one of Japan’s literary masters, twice adapted for film and TV and often taught in high school and college classrooms.
‘A novel that portrays with devastating immensity how those on the dark fringes of society can be consumed by the darkness of their own hearts’ Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police
‘Takamura’s prismatic heist novel offers a broad indictment of capitalist society’ New York Times
‘Lady Joker is a work you get immersed in, like a sprawling 19th century novel or a TV series like The Wire’ NPR
(P) 2021 Recorded Books
‘One of the great masterpieces of Japanese crime fiction and one of the must-read books of this or any year’ David Peace
Tokyo, 1995. Five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on horses. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives, but together they represent the social struggles and griefs of post-War Japan: a poorly socialized genius stuck working as a welder; a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder; a Zainichi Korean banker sick of being ostracized for his ethnicity; a struggling single dad of a teenage girl with Down syndrome. The fifth man bringing them all together is an elderly drugstore owner grieving his grandson, who has died suspiciously.
Intent on revenge against a society that values corporate behemoths more than human life, the five conspirators decide to carry out a heist: kidnap the CEO of Japan’s largest beer conglomerate and extract blood money from the company’s corrupt financiers.
Inspired by the unsolved true-crime kidnapping case perpetrated by “the Monster with 21 Faces,” Lady Joker has become a cultural touchstone since its 1997 publication, acknowledged as the magnum opus by one of Japan’s literary masters, twice adapted for film and TV and often taught in high school and college classrooms.
‘A novel that portrays with devastating immensity how those on the dark fringes of society can be consumed by the darkness of their own hearts’ Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police
‘Takamura’s prismatic heist novel offers a broad indictment of capitalist society’ New York Times
‘Lady Joker is a work you get immersed in, like a sprawling 19th century novel or a TV series like The Wire’ NPR
(P) 2021 Recorded Books
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Reviews
Lady Joker is a work you get immersed in, like a sprawling 19th century novel or a TV series like The Wire . . . Lady Joker casts a page-turning spell
A fascinating slow burn of a book, detailed, complex and immersive
A novel that portrays with devastating immensity how those on the dark fringes of society can be consumed by the darkness of their own hearts
Excellent . . . Takamura shows why she's one of Japan's most prominent mystery novelists
Hallelujah! Inspired by the real-life, still unsolved Glico-Morinaga kidnapping and extortion case which 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
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
Meticulously plotted complexity
Ruminative and idiosyncratic, this slow-burner earns its page-count
Sprawling, addictive, this X-Ray examination of a society where the have and the have nots (including the police) play a slow, inexorable dance towards catastrophe, turns into a fascinating piece of work and I look forward to its conclusion
Takamura's challenging, genre-confounding epic offers a sweeping view of contemporary Japan in all its complexity
Takamura's prismatic heist novel offers a broad indictment of capitalist society