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

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Hiroyuki makes a recording of himself reading it, and sends the tape to Hinode, which leads them in turn to begin to take the matter more seriously and call in the police, filing a complaint: "on the basis of defamation and obstruction of business" -- planning to drop the charges after they have sufficiently intimidated the dentist, whose reputation would suffer if it became know what he had done. 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. Seizo Monoi is a widower who runs a pharmacy; Yokichi Matsudo -- called Yo-chan -- is a friend of his who works as a lathe operator in a small factory. One of the great masterpieces of Japanese crime fiction and one of the must-read books of this or any year’ David Peace The personal and the professional decisions were supposedly entirely separate, but obviously it wouldn't look good if anyone ever learned about them, especially since it involved a direct relative of the president of the company, his niece.

I heard so much good things about this book and was so excited to be able to final read it, but it just didn't meet my expectations. I probably wouldn't have finished it, if it wasn't an ARC. I found it far too detailed and slow. And to make matters worse that detail did nothing to build a picture of the setting or give me much understanding of Japanese culture. Nor was there atmosphere or tension. It just felt like reams and reams of useless information. It was very long and only started to get going about 90% of the way in, which confused me, as I couldn't see how they could wrap up the story. Some how I missed that this was only volume one of the story! I don't think I'll ever find out how this ends. Little more than the decision to go after Hinode is made before the book jumps ahead again, this time only a few months, to the spring of 1995.A novel that portrays withdevastating immensityhow those on the dark fringes of society can be consumed by the darkness of their own hearts.”

From the opening chapters, Lady Joker feels like two stories. The first is a tale of post-war hardship, told through news reports and letters referring to mass lay-offs at Hinode Beer, a fictional Japanese company whose name is a pun on one of Japan’s major brewers. The second is the story of a rag-tag collection of down-and-out men gathered at a Tokyo racecourse in 1995, partaking in one of the few types of gambling legal in Japan. Both these threads are really about people struggling against their society, the boom times Japan enjoyed forever lost. In both there is also a desire for revenge.Much of the novel is also simply about process: the workings of a corporation, the police, and the press, which Takamura presents in considerable detail (indeed, at times the novel is arguably too detailed here). Without having made any public demands, the kidnappers release Shiroyama early Monday morning, having just kept him over the weekend. 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.” a b "上川隆也×柴田恭兵で「レディ・ジョーカー」連続ドラマ化！". Cinema Today (in Japanese). October 12, 2012. Archived from the original on December 15, 2018 . Retrieved December 15, 2018. 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.