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Japan, 1995. A successful university student with a promising future, the son of a respected dentist, dies suddenly, tragically, and mysteriously, breaking his father's heart. A few friends meet at the racetrack, their shared, moderately risky pastime. And at one of the most prominent beer companies in the country, a document from the company's past surfaces, threatening to compromise upper management's future.
This web of alliances and catastrophes produces a high-profile kidnapping, with a victim who isn't used to telling the truth about anything. That in turn spawns a manhunt for an anonymous conspiracy of kidnappers, who adopt the collective nom de guerre "Lady Joker," and whose professional identities and class backgrounds span the nation. Lady Joker is like the Three (actually, four) Musketeers, only less blindly patriotic and far, far more perceptive.
Will the forces of law and order catch the shady Lady? Whether they do or not, can Japan confront the social ills that fuel it, including discrimination against descendants of the feudal-era burakumin, or outcast caste?
LADY JOKER, volume one, is Marie Iida and Alison Markin Powell's long-awaited first English translation of Kaoru Takamura's 1997 novel. When Takamura's book first appeared in 1997, massive in size, epic in scale, and inspired by a notorious actual case from the 1980s, it proved controversial and endlessly fascinating to Japanese society. Adapted to film, television, and theater, it was apparently inescapable.
Received as a riveting suspense novel but also a national moral reckoning, it did not immediately find an audience outside Japan. What a wonder I have missed by not knowing Japanese, and not knowing of Takamura's work.
Her characters span a range of social types and yet are drawn with depth and empathy, much like the characters of radical social realists such as Zola and Ibsen. Iida and Powell provide a helpful glossary of character names and roles, which, like the program of an opera, never gives away too much.
Their translation reads smoothly, never overtly announcing its derivative nature. And how can we not find cultural commonality with a mystery that proceeds from a fifty-year-old firing of an employee for, allegedly, "inciting a dispute?"
Takamura's storytelling in Iida and Powell's translation offers no escapist tour of Japan three decades ago, though it does reveal plenty of fascinating details about postwar Japanese history and daily life. At the same time, LADY JOKER, part one, easily offers itself to parallels with contemporary American life: with the workings of lawless corporations, ambivalence about policing -- including from within the blackbox of police culture -- and, especially, the haunting rot of what historian Isabel Wilkerson, in her recent popular history CASTE, has recently called "casteism." LADY JOKER's expose of casteism should inspire self-reflection in the Anglophone audiences the translation will soon reach.
That said, LADY JOKER is also eminently suspenseful, thrilling, and psychologically compelling. We root for the conspiracy even though it's unclear if their method will solve the problems they protest; and for the grieving dentist, passionate labor activist, family-minded pharmacist, and other characters who struggle to escape the present dictates of an archaic caste system. Part One ends with an astounding cliffhanger.
This novel should be canonized as a classic of modern world literature, in and beyond the suspense genre. I can't wait for the second volume.
§ Rebecca Nesvet teaches English literature at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. Her research focuses on "penny bloods" and "dreadfuls." She has written for RTE since 2004.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, April 2021
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