This year I’ve been reading crime and mystery from Japanese writers and after savoring the brilliance of Keigo Higashino, I decided to buy Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama, after reading some glowing reviews it had on Amazon. I was expecting an easy read with a twisty plot, but boy was I wrong.

There are some books that you absolutely love, some that will bore you to death, and some you can’t stop thinking about but only a few books have the ability to overwhelm you and Six Four is definitely one of those. I can’t remember having read anything quite like this. At 656 pages, this is probably the longest book I’ve read in the last 5 years and it wasn’t done quickly as well, but ultimately it turned out to be a rewarding experience. It is like reading the full screenplay of a 20 episode Television Series

This isn’t the kind of detective novel that goes through its plot at a breakneck pace maneuvering through its red herrings with purpose. Instead Yokoyama serves up a vastly detailed police procedural that concentrates majorly on the relationship the Japanese Police have with their Press.

When the Commissioner of Police decides to visit a 14 year old botched up kidnapping case to offer solidarity and support to the victim, the local Media Relations Office had to get the Press to cover the visit. The Press meanwhile were grappling with another issue altogether over anonymous reporting and a major chunk of the novel builds up the tensions raising between the three departments Media Relations, Administrative Affairs and Criminal Investigations, while the Press Club that constitutes representatives from leading Newspapers in Japan, decides to abandon coverage of the commissioner’s visit in order to make the Police kowtow to their demands,

It’s all heady stuff with a lot of key players involved and each one playing their own angle to get their own version of the result. The narrative is further complicated by the similar sounding names that make it a bit difficult through the first 100 pages to make out who are who. There are about 6-7 different people with names starting with M, 5 with A and another 5 with K, so it can get a tad confusing.

To make sense of this level of detailing into the day in the life of the key players, the readers need a hand to hold on to and a sort of pedestal upon which they can look at things and decide where they stand. This is where Yokoyama scores high by giving us a protagonist in Press Director Mikami, who is vulnerable, angry, empathetic and righteous in equal measures so as to create a rounded, ultimately tragic character that the readers would like to travel with. Mikami learns everything as he goes on about his job, even as he goes through the personal tragedy of his daughter missing and his wife going into a shell. He does everything in his capacity to stop the press from holding the Police to ransom, including getting into a physical fight with them, yet when leading his team he gets protective while still being confident of his abilities to deal with the situation.

The moral implications of anonymous reporting, the rights of the media to publish the names of victims of rape or kidnap, the differences in the three offices and their score and jurisdiction, are all the issues that are gently touched upon, but at it’s heart this book is still about the trauma of the father whose child has been killed by a kidnapper and his quest to find out the kidnapper even when the entire Police department of Japan were unable to do so for fourteen years.

I didn’t see the twist coming at the end of the book, but this isn’t about it at all since there are still some lose ends and subplots awaiting closure at the end of the book.  In Mikami, Yokoyama has given us a memorable character, one that the readers would root for and one they want to see through the ordeal and how he faces it, and he doesn’t disappoint.

A quick note on, and a definite nod, to the translation as well. Jonathan Lloyd Davies, credited as the translator does a fine job of the material presented to him. One can imagine the task ahead of him when he started to go about it. It could be challenging, overwhelming and a tad frightening too, but the language was easy to read, the differences in characters and their thought processes clearly distinguished, never confounding the readers. Damn good stuff Sir.

I’d recommend Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama to anyone who has the patience to give into an ambitious and richly detailed work on the Japanese Police Procedurals. Just don’t expect a Higashino.

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