SIX FOUR: A NOVEL by Yokohama, Hideo (fiction)

This hefty book is an international best seller and the first book this author which has been translated into English.  It is a crime thriller, but unique in its style and tone. In Japan, it sold six million copies in six days! It was translated into English by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies.  The translator should be noted, as this was surely a daunting task. Meanings can be lost in translation, especially as Japanese is one of the most difficult languages to translate into English.  Complicating it all are the social conventions and nuances which don’t translate well. Inflections in voice can be important in Japanese, and complex thought must be handled with particular care or the meaning is lost. So kudos to Mr. Lloyd-Davies.

The narrative centers around a crime that occurred years before the story opens.  Shoko, a seven year old girl, was kidnapped in 1987;  later, compounded by police errors, she was found murdered.  For 14 years, the crime has remained unsolved.  The title of the novel comes from the way the crime is referred to in the police department.  The murder took place just before the death of Emperor Hirohito, which ended the Showa era which lasted for sixty-four years.

Yoshinobu Mikami, a detective who had worked on the case, becomes interested in it again when he hears the Police Commissioner wishes to pay a visit to Shoko's father to pay homage to the long dead child.  Mikami is particularly drawn to this case as his own daughter, Ayumi, has been missing for three months, and he and his wife live in dread of hearing of her death, especially as they have received several mysteriously silent phone calls.  Mikami, who once worked in criminal investigations, in the years since had been relegated to the position of press director. This keeps him out of the loop of crime investigations.  Any information he receives is highly controlled by his superior officers. Relations between reporters and police have a formal method to them, as do the interactions between police and victim’s families, which will seem unusual to readers used to western crime novels.

As Mikami delves deeper into the cold case file of the old murder, he begins to find discrepancies and possible cover-ups of the detectives’ handling of evidence.  Now the story becomes one of relationships and games of cat and mouse in the crime department.  Getting to the bottom of departmental corruption is compounded by the social dynamics of the characters and cultural tropes and politenesses that are not part of western crime departments. At one point Mikami muses, “The kind of people who made it to the top, the survivors, were those who kept their secrets close.  The moment you let go of them…….was the moment you lost.”

This is a rich and complex novel. The cast of characters is large and I often returned to the helpful listing of characters at the beginning of the book.  It is an intricate and unusual crime novel that cannot be placed in any ordinary category.  If the reader sticks with it, he or she will be rewarded with a brilliant work of fiction and an interesting look into the workings and everyday relationships of a Japanese police department where motives in the end are not so very different than those of the west.