Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Hideo Yokoyama, Six Four *** 1/2

Six Four is an unusual crime novel in that it deals primarily with (Japanese) police department politics. The main character, Mikami, is director of Media Relations, and he's trying to satisfy an unruly press corps while the two major branches of the police, Administrative Affairs and Criminal Investigations, are engaged in a civil war. Meanwhile, the commissioner is coming down from Tokyo to pay his respects to the victims of an unsolved kidnapping/murder from fourteen years previous. "Six Four" is the detective's slang for that case, because it occurred in the sixty-fourth (and final) year of the Showa period.

Most of Mikami's "detective" work is figuring out what's going on between the departments, and there's no current crime until four fifths of the way through. If you accept this offbeat angle, Six Four is well plotted, and the author is thorough about making Mikami's reasoning explicit. When the new crime finally kicks in, many of the small details from earlier become relevant. The prose is a bit stiff, which may be Yokoyama's fault or the translator's.

I really like the packaging of the Picador edition, although it suggests a different type of book. I would say it's the opposite of "Cinematic," as Entertainment Weekly called it; and the endorser who compares Yokoyama to James Ellroy has completely misunderstood the appeal of one or both authors.

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