Hallelujah! Inspired by the real-life, still unsolved Glico-Morinaga kidnapping and extortion case which led to the nationwide hunt for “The Monster with Twenty-one Faces,” Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker is at last available in translation; epic in its scale and vision, yet gripping from first to last, this is one of the great masterpieces of Japanese crime fiction and one of the must-read books of this or any year

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

Takamura’s prismatic heist novel offers a broad indictment of capitalist society

Lady Joker is a work you get immersed in, like a sprawling 19th century novel or a TV series like The Wire . . . Lady Joker casts a page-turning spell

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

Excellent . . . Takamura shows why she’s one of Japan’s most prominent mystery novelists

Takamura’s challenging, genre-confounding epic offers a sweeping view of contemporary Japan in all its complexity

Sprawling, addictive, this X-Ray examination of a society where the have and the have nots (including the police) play a slow, inexorable dance towards catastrophe, turns into a fascinating piece of work and I look forward to its conclusion

A fascinating slow burn of a book, detailed, complex and immersive

Meticulously plotted complexity

Ruminative and idiosyncratic, this slow-burner earns its page-count