Lady Joker, Volume 2

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

This second half of Lady Joker, by Kaoru Takamura, the Grand Dame of Japanese crime fiction, concludes the breathtaking saga introduced in Volume I.

Inspired by the real-life Glico-Morinaga kidnapping, an unsolved case that terrorized Japan for two years, Lady Joker reimagines the circumstances of this watershed episode in modern Japanese history and brings into riveting focus the lives and motivations of the victims, the perpetrators, the heroes and the villains. As the shady networks linking corporations to syndicates are brought to light, the stakes rise, and some of the professionals we have watched try to fight their way through this crisis will lose everything some even their lives. Will the culprits ever be brought to justice? More importantly what is justice?

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Praise for Lady Joker, Volume 2

TIME Magazine's 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time
CrimeReads Best International Crime Fiction of 2022
A CrimeReads Best Crime Novel of 2022
A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book of 2022

A sprawling, absorbing saga . . . Examines a vast web of characters affected by a kidnapping and sabotage case in Tokyo. The action moves fluidly from news desks to corporate offices, as the police and press track a shadowy crime group calling itself Lady Joker.
The Washington Post

Like all literature, readers will take what they want from Takamura s critique of Japanese society, but at the heart of the epic novel is a gripping crime story where the actual crime itself is almost secondary to the psychological ripples it sends through the boardrooms, police stations, press offices and homes of anyone connected. This is much more of a whydunit than a whodunit and one that was well worth the wait.
The Japan Times< br>
Takamura joins American writers James Ellroy, author of American Tabloid, and Don Winslow, author of several novels about the drug trade, to illuminate a society in which power and money matter far more than morality. All three write mysteries that also function as morality plays . . . Bravura.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

As comprehensive a critique of postwar Japanese society as can fit in a mystery-genre story . . . Lady Joker is rich with procedure and detail, each page describing and indicting the society that creates conditions ripe for antisocial crime. Yet Lady Joker also matches the best of modern suspense fiction in action and plotting.
Jacobin

Brilliantly dark.
Ms. Magazine

[A] crime saga with impressive sweep.
The Complete Review

A complex work of stunning breadth and depth by a master of the genre.
Kirkus Reviews

Admirers of intricate crime fiction, which both engages the intellect and offers ins ights into the hidden parts of a society, will hope for further translations of this gifted author s work.
Publishers Weekly

Praise for Lady Joker, Volume 1

Hinging on a kidnapping plot, Takamura s prismatic heist novel offers a broad indictment of capitalist society.
The 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. It reveals its world in rich polyphonic detail. Inspired by a real-life case, it takes us inside half a dozen main characters, follows scads of secondary ones and enters bars and boardrooms we could never otherwise go . . . Yet for all its digressions, Lady Joker casts a page-turning spell.
John Powers, NPR s Fresh Air

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 alienati on felt by characters on both sides of the law from institutions they once believed would protect them resonates surprisingly with American culture.
Paula Woods, Los Angeles Times

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.
Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review