A review by glenmowrer
Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura

4.0

4.4* This is a lengthy work made daunting by the "Volume One" identifier. Slow to hold my attention at first it soon enveloped me in what is a combination police procedural and crime caper mixed in with cultural sociological twists that are hard to grasp for one outside the Japanese social evolution. In fact at the end of this tome I have come to assume that it is very unlikely that I, a non-native, will grasp the motivating factors that are in play here. But the author goes pretty deeply into the nitty gritty workings of newspapers, financial schemers, big corporations and even a dentist to flesh out the plot. Clearly she did a Herculean amount of work to garner such insight into each of these diverse sub sets of society. At nearly 600 pages it sometimes seemed that I was not making much progress. Certainly this is true if one assumes that all such stories should evolve in a more or less direct line (littered with clues) to the "solution" of the problem posed by the author. In this case, however, much of the "progress" is gaining insight into a corporate executive's work day or a Japanese newspaper editor's grind. I avidly look forward to Volume Two.