The first systematic attempt to introduce a full range of Japanese scholarship on the agrarian history of British India to the English-language reader. Suggests the fundamental importance of an Asian comparative perspective for the understanding of Indian history.
One of Japan’s great modern masters, Kaoru Takamura, makes her English-language debut with this two-volume publication of her magnum opus. Tokyo, 1995. Five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on horses. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives, but together they represent the social struggles and griefs of post-War Japan: a poorly socialized genius stuck working as a welder; a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder; a Zainichi Korean banker sick of being ostracized for his race; a struggling single dad of a teenage girl with Down syndrome. The fifth man bringing them all together is an elderly drugstore owner grieving his grandson, who has died suspiciously after the revelation of a family connection with the segregated buraku community, historically subjected to severe discrimination. Intent on revenge against a society that values corporate behemoths more than human life, the five conspirators decide to carry out a heist: kidnap the CEO of Japan’s largest beer conglomerate and extract blood money from the company’s corrupt financiers. Inspired by the unsolved true-crime kidnapping case perpetrated by “the Monster with 21 Faces,” Lady Joker has become a cultural touchstone since its 1997 publication, acknowledged as the magnum opus by one of Japan’s literary masters, twice adapted for film and TV and often taught in high school and college classrooms.
“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.” —Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police This second half of Lady Joker, by Kaoru Takamura, the Grand Dame of Japanese crime fiction, concludes the breathtaking saga introduced in Volume I. Inspired by the real-life Glico-Morinaga kidnapping, an unsolved case that terrorized Japan for two years, Lady Joker reimagines the circumstances of this watershed episode in modern Japanese history and brings into riveting focus the lives and motivations of the victims, the perpetrators, the heroes and the villains. As the shady networks linking corporations to syndicates are brought to light, the stakes rise, and some of the professionals we have watched try to fight their way through this crisis will lose everything—some even their lives. Will the culprits ever be brought to justice? More importantly—what is justice?
The 1980s saw a whole wave of practical applications of fuzzy theory, mainly in the field of process control, with Japan as pioneer. In the '90s there has been a flood of applications to household electrical appliances, and?fuzzy? has become a high-tech buzz-word in Japan. Since then many countries have followed suit and developed their own fuzzy applications.This book reviews the burgeoning industrial applications of fuzzy theory. The contributors are mostly industrial engineers or research experts in the field. The areas covered include automobiles, home appliances, voice recognition, medical techniques, fuzzy design, process control, space operations and mobile autonomous robots.Very recently the development of fuzzy theory has become intertwined with fields such as neural networks and chaos. This volume also summarizes such trends in an industrial context.The book will be of use to senior undergraduates or graduate students, industrial research scientists, and anyone interested in the wide-ranging applicational aspects of fuzzy theory today.
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