Lady Joker: Volume 2: The Million Copy Bestselling 'Masterpiece of Japanese Crime Fiction'

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Consists of 3 parts and was told alternatingly in between characters, Lady Joker revolves around a team of 5 men with different backgrounds, life struggles and resentment to meet and plan to kidnap the CEO of a Japan's largest beer conglomerate and asking for a huge sum of ransom from the company's corrupt financiers.

Lady Joker: Volume 2 by Kaoru Takamura | Hachette UK Lady Joker: Volume 2 by Kaoru Takamura | Hachette UK

I’ve heard it said that translators’ names should be on the cover, and that honor is well deserved here. It is a good cultural flashback of the post-bubble Japanese society with problems (discrimination against different groups) rooted in history (that's why the story's origin goes back as long as the post-war time), but the crime story itself was boring to me.I understand that this is a cultural touchstone of crime literature in Japan, that it's taught in schools and considered a significant work. Ich fand es vor allem in der ersten Hälfte schwer verständlich und langweilig und habe nur weitergelesen, weil ich jetzt schon so viel Zeit investiert hatte (es sind zusammen mit dem ersten Band 1200 Seiten) und weil immer wieder Kapitel kommen, die dann wirklich interessant waren. Lady Joker’ was originally published as ‘Redi jōkā’ in Japan in 1997 and was translated from the Japanese by Marie Iida and Allison Markin Powell.

Lady Joker: Volume 2: The Million Copy Bestselling Lady Joker: Volume 2: The Million Copy Bestselling

Tbh I got bored of all the minute details after a while, especially when the CEO was going on and Hinging on a kidnapping plot, Takamura’s prismatic heist novel offers a broad indictment of capitalist society. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. Watching a sort of psychological chess game with men who have nothing to lose makes this a great read to sink your teeth into.Iida and Powell prove that English holds a world of words that showcase beauty, depth and highly specific meanings—far from the banal, undifferentiated language we native speakers oft accuse it of being. The depth of empathy readers will feel for this book’s characters directly corresponds with the author’s insight on the intersections of human existence. Volume 2 focuses on the fall out for all involved: the victim, the police investigators, the journalists and the perpetrators themselves.