New Read: Lady Joker, Volume Two, by Kaoru Takamura

Self is crushing the reading list, this first month of 2023. Her next book is a Japanese crime novel, her first by Kaoru Takamura: Lady Joker, volume two, translated from the Japanese by Marie Iida and Allison Markin Powell.

Takamura is a crime novelist who is well-known in her native Japan. She has written thirteen novels, and has won the Japan Mystery and Suspense Grand Prize, the Naoki Prize, the Noma Literary Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, the Shinran Prize, the Jiro Orasagi Prize, the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, and the Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize. Her first novel to be translated into English was Lady Joker, which received the Mainichi Arts Award.

The first character to really catch self’s interest, 14 pages in, is Yuichiro Goda. Here’s how he’s described in the list of Dramatis Personae:

• MPD, First Investigation Division, Third Violent Crime Investigation Team, Seventh Unit. Later joins Criminal Investigation Division, Violent Crime Unit at Omori Police Department, Assistant Police Inspector

He’s been given the responsibility of guarding Kyosuke Shiroyama, President and CEO of Hinode Beer, who’s the target of an extortion attempt by the gang known as the Lady Joker.

p. 14:

• As far as Shiroyama could tell, however, under his apparent neutrality Goda’s eyes displayed subtle shades of darkness — wondering what that prudent gaze saw, three steps behind him, made Shiroyama feel, if not uncomfortable, then at least unsettled. From Goda’s outward appearance or manner, Shiroyama had no inkling whether he had seen Shiroyama pick up the envelope on his lawn the day before yesterday, that morning when they first met. Just this very morning, in the car on the way to the office, Shiroyama had tried to trick him into talking about it by musing why the criminals had not appeared, but Goda, with a momentary pause, merely replied, “I’ve been instructed only to act as your guard, sir.”

Ah! A laconic leading man. Nice!

Stay tuned.

The Evil Villain

I know that’s totally non sequitur, but as the Villain himself would say, Ha ha.

Yes, this Villain ends each sentence with a “Ha ha.” Not laughing “ha ha” but “ha ha” like he’s reading the words from a book.

He has a gun pointed to the back of our hero’s head, and he keeps saying “Ha ha.”

Mr. Ha ha Villain tells the hero to unbuckle his belt, whereupon:

I unbuckled it. The holster hit my knee and turned over. The gun fell out on the shed floor.

“Now you can buckle up again. Nice belt, ha-ha.”

(At this point I’m going to stop most of the ha-ha shit, because he said it all the time, as a kind of verbal punctuation. Just let me add that it was extremely Rumplestiltskin-ish. Which is to say, creepy.)

— Fairy Tale, p. 200

Our hero then has an epiphany: I had no clue how to turn the tables on the little fucker.

Stay tuned.

Top Dialogue, p. 186

Surely no one expects Charlie Reade to be able to concentrate in class when he’s been ferrying $115k worth of gold in his backpack, and has just been bequeathed land, house, and more gold than anyone ever dreamed of in their entire lives? And has just seen a dead giant cockroach in a shed? Let’s give it a try, however.

Charlie Reade is sitting in class, it’s Period Six, the course is America Today. Teacher calls on him just as he’s beginning to daydream about Wizard of Oz:

“Charles, have you fallen asleep back there? Or perhaps my mellifluous voice has hypnotized you? Entranced you?”

“No, I’m right here.”

“Then perhaps you’d give us your considered opinion regarding the blue-on-black shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.”

“Bad shit.”

“Bad shit indeed. Please feel free to reenter your trance state, Mr. Reade.”

— Fairy Tale, pp. 185 – 186

Self has an objection: Are American teachers, she means real life American teachers, really this witty? She thinks not!

Stay tuned.

Fairy Tale, p. 138: The Mysterious Shed

Self knew it, she knew it! SOMETHING is trying to get out of the padlocked shed in Mr. Bowditch’s backyard!

First, the dog starts barking, using her “Intruder Alert” bark.

• She was facing the shed, her ears laid back and her muzzle wrinkled to show her teeth. Foam flew from her mouth with each bark. I ran to her and grabbed her collar and tried to pull her back. She didn’t want to come, but it was clear she also didn’t want to go closer to the locked shed. Even with the fusillade of barks, I could hear that weird scraping, scratching sound. This time it was louder, and I saw the door moving a little. It was like a visible heartbeat. Something was trying to get out . . . Something inside the shed hit the door hard enough for me to hear the thud.

The MC, Charlie, has heard those sounds from the shed before. Since the door to the shed is padlocked, and he doesn’t have the key, he has taken to banging on the door. Whatever is inside quiets after that.

But today, the sounds are loud and manic. The dog, who is old and arthritic, turns tail and runs, “not a single sign of a limp.”

Mr. Bowditch comes outside and yells at the boy to “get away from there!” He straps on his gun, which “looked like something out of Gunfight at the O. K. Corral.” (Self is very impressed that an American teenager knows enough old movies to compare Mr. Bowditch’s gun to the one in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Surely Charlie wasn’t even born yet when the movie came out.)

Then, Mr. Bowditch does this very strange thing: he takes a key from his pocket, unlocks the padlock, walks inside the shed, and closes the door.

Eeeek! Don’t look, self! Cover your eyes! But she has to keep on reading, to find out what sort of strange, malevolent creature is locked in the shed. She hopes it’s not one of those creatures like the ones from the movie Signs. Or one of those click-click creatures from The Last of Us. She’s about ready to scream in terror, though it’s 8:18 a.m. and bright morning. She hopes she can sleep tonight.

Strangely enough, the barking dog’s name is RADAR. She is always the first to sniff out danger, so the name fits.

Stay tuned.

Elegiac Stephen King

Self is hugely employing Fairy Tale. She knows how much she is enjoying it because she’s slowed down her reading pace: in January (with ten days still to go), self had been spending an average of three or four days on a book. Until now.

There is something poignant about the father-son relationship, about how King takes the time to show it repairing itself after a cataclysmic loss. Only a few pages in, self was vested in the boy, in his life. King takes his time showing the boy’s life beginning to take shape and then — he’s such a sly writer — in the MC’s senior year, something happens: he helps out an elderly neighbor.

How can such a simple thing be the hinge of an entire life? Well, this is Stephen King, so maybe there’s something fable-like about it. The MC, Charlie, takes care of the neighbor’s dog, Radar, and they begin to bond. Self loved this passage:

We went out back, where I knew I could get four bars on my phone. I sat on the steps and Radar sat beside me. I opened Safari, typed ‘sharpening with a whetstone’, looked at a couple of videos, then went to work. It didn’t take long to put a pretty keen edge on the scythe.

I took a picture to show Mr. Bowditch, then biked to the hospital. Found him sleeping. Biked back in the late afternoon light and fed Radar. Missed baseball a little.

Well . . . maybe more than a little.

— Fairy Tale, p. 63

(Except — there is that padlocked shed in the back, DUN DUN DUN. Self may just find herself screaming outta here when the hero eventually confronts the thing inside that’s making mysterious scratching noises)

Stephen King Again

Self is writing a story about her college days. Which means that reading Stephen King makes perfect sense.

• There were terrible things in my future — I’ll tell you about them eventually — but none of the terrible things I had lain awake imagining ever came to pass.

She’s only on p. 16 of Fairy Tale, but she’s already so vested in the book’s characters.

Stephen King’s FAIRY TALE, p. 4

Dad “was an insurance claims adjuster, and he told me once that the only pure accident he ever heard of was a man in Arizona who was killed when a meteor hit him in the head.”

No one writes like Stephen King, no one.

Skidoo, Who is either a Squid or an Octopus

Captain Nicolette Larson’s trusty right-hand humanoid, Darby, is eight feet tall and has four arms (Now wonder he’s such a demon in the kitchen!). The other assistant is Skidoo, who is either a squid or an octopus. Atlanta, one of the twelve heirs to the Empress of the Hive Mind, caught Skidoo in flagrante delicto with Milly the pastry chef.

Now, where was I?

SPOILER ALERT!

The crew are now prisoners of the meanest pirate in the Known World, Tubal Last (Author Cat Rambo couldn’t come up with a better name for her pirate? She already named the main ship You Sexy Thing!)

They are outfitted with gold bracelets that function as a sort of monitor. When the guard moves to Skidoo (Self is almost sure Skidoo is a squid), he realizes he’ll have to use something other than a bracelet.

Guard: “You gotta get tagged. The others can’t slip out of that bracelet, but you sure as hell can.”

Skidoo: “You are being a handsome one. Perhaps is being a deal possible?” (Skidoo gave a seductive, sinuous wriggle)

Guard: “Honey, I’m not wired that way. But points for trying.”

She extended a tentacle with a sigh.

— You Sexy Thing, p. 198

“Ship, Are There Any More Cookies?”

The ship You Sexy Thing has its own agenda! It is programmed to deliver the putated hijackers — the owner and staff of the Last Chance restaurant from TwiceFar Station — to IAPH (the International Association of Pirate Havens) but it has secretly decided: “not until I learn how to cook!”

Because, the whole time, Thing has been absorbing lessons from the chef and has been experimenting with meals, and then recording the emotions of the crew as they partake of its meals — hunger, pleasure — and this has become Thing‘s addiction.

Self feared, the first time she realized Thing had agency, that the book was entering HAL 1000/2001 Space Odyssey territory. Who knows, it still might veer that way. In the meantime, the crew has discovered that they have a stowaway: one of the twelve heirs to the Empress of the Hive Mind, a 17-year-old who was shipped to TwiceFar Station in a crate — Quel mystère! Good thing the chef decided to open the crate, just before the explosions that destroyed the station!

The Game’s Afoot

You Sexy Thing is not the first ship that Captain Niko (short for Nikolette Larson? Ho ho ho) has been on. She has at least a passing acquaintance with one other ship, called Constant Craving.

HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAA

To get access to You Sexy Thing, she had to use a password. Guess what it is? Clue here.