Lady Joker, Volume 2 - Takamura, Kaoru
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"This tour-de-force is widely regarded as the quintessential post-WWII Japanese novel. A plan to kidnap a major corporation's CEO becomes an allegory for the alienation of the individual self, a mirror to modern-day Japaense identity. In 1995 in Tokyo, five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on the horses. They have little in common except a disaffection with their lives. One is a poorly socialized but genius factory welder. One is a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder. One is an ethnically Korean banker who is tired of being ostracized for his race. One is a truck driver…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
"This tour-de-force is widely regarded as the quintessential post-WWII Japanese novel. A plan to kidnap a major corporation's CEO becomes an allegory for the alienation of the individual self, a mirror to modern-day Japaense identity. In 1995 in Tokyo, five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on the horses. They have little in common except a disaffection with their lives. One is a poorly socialized but genius factory welder. One is a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder. One is an ethnically Korean banker who is tired of being ostracized for his race. One is a truck driver who struggles to make ends meet; he is also the harried single parent of a teenage girl with down's syndrome. The fifth man, Monoi, a sixty-five-year-old drug store owner, is the one who brings them all together. Monoi has a hard past and a tragic present. He grew up in poverty during the war, and gave the best years of his life working for companies that didn't take care of him. Last summer, his only grandson was killed in a highly suspicious one-person car accident; shortly after, Monoi's son-in-law, the boy's father, a successful dentist, committed suicide after a correspondence with Hinode Beer Company, a huge conglomerate where his son had been interviewing. Snooping around, Monoi discovers a very strange chain of communication between his dead son-in-law and a blackmailer over a forgotten family secret. Monoi, alone in the world and intent on revenge, decides to put together a heist that will victimize the corporate behemoth that stole his family: he will kidnap Hinode's CEO and extract blood money from the corrupt financiers who back it. He enlists his four disaffected friends to help pull it off"--
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Autorenporträt
Kaoru Takamura was born in Osaka in 1953 and is the author of thirteen novels. Her debut, Grab the Money and Run, won the 1990 Japan Mystery and Suspense Grand Prize, and since then her work has been recognized with many of Japan’s most prestigious awards for literary fiction as well as for crime fiction: the Naoki Prize, the Noma Literary Award, the Yomiuri Prize, the Shinran Prize, the Jiro Osaragi Prize, the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, and the Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize. Lady Joker, her first novel to be translated into English, received the Mainichi Arts Award and has been adapted into both a film and a television series. Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She has been awarded grants from English PEN and the NEA, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Her other translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, and Fuminori Nakamura. She was the guest editor for the first Japan issue of Words Without Borders, and she maintains the database Japanese Literature in English. Marie Iida has served as an interpreter for the New York Times bestselling author Marie Kondo’s Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Her nonfiction translations have appeared in Nang, MoMA Post, Eureka and over half a dozen monographs on contemporary Japanese artists and architects, including Yayoi Kusama, Toyo Ito, and Kenya Hara for Rizzoli New York. Marie currently writes a monthly column for Gentosha Plus about communicating in English as a native Japanese speaker.
Rezensionen
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

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 insights 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 alienation 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…mehr