After finishing a simple breakfast with his wife, Shiroyama moved into the living room to be alone, and just as he was about to open the morning paper, he happened to notice a strange object in his front yard, on the grass just outside the window. Since the object was no more than ten meters away, he immediately saw that it was a business envelope.
Shiroyama slipped on his geta sandals and went out the front door into the yard, where he picked up the envelope, slick with morning dew. The standard-issue manila envelope, both front and back left blank, was not even sealed, and he could feel its thinness as the paper flopped in his hand. He opened the envelope where he stood and took out a single sheet of stationery that had been folded into thirds, and when he opened it the rows of characters written in the same style as in the letter delivered to the Kanagawa factory on April 28th leapt before his eyes.
The characters were in katakana, drawn with a ruler, and consisted of four lines.
we’ve delivered a letter to the kyoto factory. alert the police and follow our instructions. prepare the six hundred million, but store it on site at the company for a while. if you don’t want the hostage to die, don’t let the police know about this letter.
—lady joker
This letter delivered a blow to Shiroyama that he had not experienced when he saw the previous letter. The severe, chilling indifference of “Lady Joker,” who was holding the 3.5 million kiloliters of beer hostage, seemed to penetrate the ground under his feet.
For a few seconds Shiroyama stood in the middle of the lawn holding the open letter, completely unaware of his surroundings, and it was only when he began to tuck the letter back in the envelope that he suddenly noticed the man—tall and wearing a dark navy suit—standing outside the gate about ten meters away. He saw me, Shiroyama thought instantly, followed by, Who is that? As Shiroyama stood paralyzed, the man bent his body at a precise forty-five-degree angle in a deep bow.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Goda.”
“I see . . . It’s still early.”
“I arrived a little early. I thought I should take a look around your neighborhood. I’m sorry to disturb you.”
With that, the officer on guard bowed his head robotically for a second time, then disappeared without a sound.
End of Volume I
about the author
Kaoru Takamura was born in Osaka in 1953 and is the author of thirteen novels. Her debut, Grab the Money and Run, won the 1990 Japan Mystery and Suspense Grand Prize, and since then her work has been recognized with many of Japan’s most prestigious awards for literary fiction as well as for crime fiction: the Naoki Prize, the Noma Literary Award, the Yomiuri Prize, the Shinran Prize, the Jiro Osagari Prize, the Mystery Writers of Japan Award, and the Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize. Lady Joker, her first novel to be translated into English, received the Mainichi Arts Award and had been adapted into both a film and a television series.
about the translators
Marie Iida has served as an interpreter for the New York Times bestselling author Marie Kondo’s Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Her non-fiction translations have appeared in Nang, MoMA Post, Eureka and over half a dozen monographs on contemporary Japanese artists and architects, including Yayoi Kusama, Toyo Ito, and Kenya Hara for Rizzoli New York. Marie currently writes a monthly column for Gentosha Plus about communicating in English as a native Japanese speaker.
Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She has been awarded grants from English PEN and the NEA, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. She has translated fiction by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, and Fuminori Nakamura. She was the guest editor for the first Japan issue of Words Without Borders, and she maintains the database Japanese Literature in English.
