After Takayuki's tragic death, his father Hiroyuki sent two letters to Hinode, vaguely accusing them of impropriety -- going so far as to use the name of the Buraku Liberation League (BLL). 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. Hinode rode the Japanese economic resurgence after the Second World War as well as any company; in 1990 it is: "a trillion-yen business that ranked among the twenty most profitable firms in Japan". There are the unusual circumstances that there were no police patrols in the vicinity at the time of the kidnapping -- leading Goda to suspect that the criminals had access to a police radio, meaning that someone from the police is involved. 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 cast or dramatis personae is provided at the start of the book which becomes increasingly useful as following the initial chapters we follow the story from a range of perspectives. When they release him, the kidnappers do have demands -- but Shiroyama is instructed to give the police a different story than their actual demands. They understand Shiroyama might not be being entirely forthcoming with them, and they continue to investigate accordingly. 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. Mysterious and multilayered, [ Lady Joker] gives readers extortion and kidnapping as it critiques the dark corners of Japanese society and the human experience.”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. They may have made a monetary demand, but they are more fixated on the act of squeezing the money out rather than on the money itself.

Blindfolded the entire time, he never saw his kidnappers; readers know these must be some of 'The Men' from Part One of the novel, but they remain anonymous, unidentifiable figures here, and Takamura never shifts to their perspective.To have only the first half of a crime story may seem like a cruel tease, and readers may be tempted to wait out the year until the conclusion is available as well, but, as noted, Lady Joker is anything but your usual mystery.

Impressive, very large-scale crime(-and-more) novel of post-war Japan . . . Lady Joker is anything but your usual mystery.” a b "第５９回毎日芸術賞: 贈呈式　受賞７人、喜びの声". Mainichi Shimbun (in Japanese). January 26, 2018 . Retrieved December 15, 2018. Oof. It's long. We see multiple characters alienated from their lives in different ways, plot to kidnap an executive and extort money from his company, Hinode Beer. Once the kidnap happens, these characters disappear from our view.Lady Joker reads like Don DeLillo’s Underworld rewritten by James Ellroy, or perhaps LA Confidential rewritten by Don DeLillo? What I’m trying to say here is, Lady Joker is EPIC.” With a host of slots that are guaranteed to make old-timers of slot gaming nostalgic, Amatic has tried to capture a good part of slot gaming community in a solid grip. Takamura's first novel, Ōgon o daite tobe ( 黄金を抱いて翔ベ, Grab the Money and Run), was published in 1990 and won the Japan Mystery and Suspense Grand Prize. [2] Two years later her novel Riviera o ute ( リヴィエラを撃て, Shoot Riviera), a thriller about an Irish man mysteriously murdered in Tokyo as part of an apparent international espionage plot, was published, winning both the Mystery Writers of Japan Award and the Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize. [1] [2] Ōgon o daite tobe was later adapted into the 2012 Kazuyuki Izutsu film of the same name, starring Satoshi Tsumabuki and Tadanobu Asano. [3]