On the night of March 18, 1984, in a wealthy neighborhood of Osaka, Japan, masked intruders pulled the president of the Glico candy corporation out of his bathtub, took him to a warehouse hideout, and demanded an outrageous sum for his return. Three days into his confinement, the president escaped with the ransom unpaid, yet the letters from the would-be extorters persisted. At the time, Japanese police rarely failed to solve major crimes, but here they were clueless. The criminal group signed their letters “The Mystery Man with 21 Faces” and made frequent threats and taunts about the “idiot police” and their incompetence.

They threatened to release cyanide-laced Glico candy onto store shelves, and soon Glico halted production in a panic. “The Mystery Man” repeated the poisoning threat with the Morinaga candy company, but this time they made good: nearly two dozen boxes of cyanide-laced Morinaga chocolates were found in grocery stores across the country. (The boxes were cheekily labeled as poison, and no one was hurt.) Ransom drops were arranged, but “The Mystery Man” never appeared to collect them. Commentators called it a new kind of crime, one closer to performance art that remained outside the profit motive. Who were they? What did they really want? Suddenly, in August 1985, the group wrote a parting letter — “It’s fun to live a bad man’s life” — and disappeared. They were never found and, according to police, never collected any money. To this day, the Glico-Morinaga case remains one of Japan’s most notorious unsolved crimes.

Kaoru Takamura, one of the first women crime novelists to find commercial and critical success in Japan and thus dubbed the “Queen of Mysteries,” fictionalizes the case in her thousand-plus-page Lady Joker, which was originally published in Japan in 1997. It is only now available in English, in two volumes, the first time that any of Takamura’s fiction has been translated. In Japan the novel sold more than one million copies and is considered a new classic, a sensational true-crime tale that’s as comprehensive a critique of postwar Japanese society as can fit in a mystery-genre story. Lady Joker is rich with procedure and detail, each page describing and indicting the society that creates conditions ripe for antisocial crime.