Six Four – A Spellbinding and Singular Work of Crime Fiction

At its best, crime fiction can serve as the window to a nation’s cultural and emotional landscape. Wrapped within the universal themes of morality, guilt, honor, and remorse are the specificities of particular settings. A good crime literature can take us deep into the conflicting social and cultural forces of a nation that’s otherwise not proudly displayed in the tourist pamphlets. The phenomenal Scandinavian crime writing (or Nordic Noir) has exactly been doing that; immersing us in the atmospherics and ethnographic data. Japanese crime authors have long been taking readers into the undisclosed, unsavory parts of their landscape and mindscape. Keigo Higashino, Natsuo Kirino, Fuminori Nakamura, Seicho Matsumoto, Kanae Minato, etc have their own unique style in depicting the mayhem and chaos, a result of central character’s relentless pursuit for truth. Hideo Yokoyama, my recent discovery, definitely occupies a prominent place among the Japanese crime writers. But his huge door-stopper of a novel (640 pages) Six Four (translated to English by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies) neither possesses a whodunit mystery at its center nor the procedural follows fingerprints and DNA to achieve the notion of justice. It’s an entirely different kind of page-turner, one that fuels suspense and tension by navigating through labyrinths of a bureaucratic institution.

Bureaucratic offices can be a perfect setting for satirical literature. But rarely do we come across novels like Six Four which employs office spaces and their hidden political warfare to diffuse a chilling reading experience. Initially, Six Four appears to be a familiar detective story. It opens in an autopsy room. A middle-aged prefectural Inspector Mikami (working in a province, north of Tokyo) and his beautiful, vulnerable wife Minako are searching unidentified bodies ever since their teenage daughter Ayumi ran away from home. Right before we think the novel is about the mystery behind Ayumi’s disappearance, we are introduced to a 14-year-old case involving the kidnapping and murder of seven-year-old Shoko (occurred in the year 1989). The novel's title refers to this case and the kidnapper-killer was never captured. The statue of limitations is about to go into effect in a year. Mikami was one of the detectives charged with retrieval of Shoko. After years of working as detective in Criminal Investigations, he is unexpectedly transferred to Administrator Affairs and provided with the job of Press Director. One day he hopes to move back to the detective role and work with his pals at Criminal Investigations.

Nevertheless, he has done a fine job so far as the head of Media Relations, avoiding the legal strictures to trample press freedom and does his best to keep things democratic. The ‘six four’ case is first mentioned in the novel, not because the police have attained a new clue, but due to the visit of  a powerful Commissioner General from Tokyo. The higher official wants to meet the officers still investigating the case, pay respects at Shoko’s grave, meet Shoko’s agonized father Amamiya, and give an interview to the press. The Administrative Affairs head Akama – Mikami’s boss – dubs it as an effort to renew the public interest in ‘six four’ case. The issue of Mikami’s missing daughter plays a pivotal role in shaping his current volatile emotional state. At home, Minako is remote and uncommunicative. They have received silent calls few days back, which Minako insists were from Ayumi and hence she has decided to not leave the house, waiting for the call. Mikami has dizzying spells and there’s more pressure from his boss to keep an iron grip on the subject of press access.

Novelist Mr. Hideo Yokoyama

If you think Ayumi’s current predicament and nabbing of Shoko’s killer is the sole focus of Six Four, then you are mistaken. The large chunk of the novel is devoted to Mikami’s straining relationship with the press members and uncovering the hidden meaning regarding Commissioner General’s visit to the Prefectural Division. Apart from the burgeoning conflict with the press, Mikami also finds himself caught in the middle of an internecine war between Administrative Affairs and Criminal Investigations. Mikami stays ambivalent in expressing his sense of loyalty. Moreover, he learns another important detail about this organizational battle: a dangerous cover-up tracking back to the ‘six four’ case. Mikami uses his detective skills to clear through the thicket of bureaucratic red-tapes and finds quite a few perplexing truths.

Hideo Yokoyama has worked as a police reporter and desk editor before becoming a novelist. It shows in the way Yokoyama intricately establishes the relationship between the police and press and the stifling hierarchical flow within police force. The novel has a slow-burn start with the author meticulously realizing the set-up and ingeniously fleshing out the mind-boggling array of characters (I was confused with the names of multiple characters starting with letter ‘M’ -- Mikami, Minako, Mikumo, Matsuoka, Mikuri, etc.). For a casual reader seeking an edge-of-the-seat police procedural, Six Four may not work. After patiently getting through the first 100 pages, observing all the idiosyncratic cultural details and rich character sketches, we are left to confront the gradually escalating tense atmospherics. But still for a casual crime fiction order, the novel’s narrative style and length may demand a lot of attention. Six Four doesn’t contain the thrill-of-the-chase up until the riveting final phase. Mostly, the novel traps us within Mikami’s head-space as he navigates through doubts and uncertainties related to office politics. I found Mikami’s introspective journey so as to unveil the tangled threads of hierarchy and personal egos very interesting. But the same could not be said to all crime-fiction-seekers.

The book does justify its huge length. Despite that brilliant twist at the end, Yokoyama’s writing goes beyond luscious plot games. He makes us see the complex machinations of a multi-layered society from the perspective of an ordinary, ethical man. Mikami’s mental wrestling is charged with the profundity of a serious literature. The existential angst nagging our exhausted hero, which no doubt is soaked with social and cultural specificity, provides surprising universal resonance at times. So does the flawed and duplicitous nature of institutions depicted in the book: media, law, and marriage. While Yokoyama reveals the heart of darkness lurking beneath the veneer of elegance, the immensely satisfying denouement is saturated with hope.

Six Four is an exceptionally complex and insightful crime novel that demands readers’ full-attention and generously rewards them back. It subverts from the conventions of a police procedural narrative and becomes a shrewd treatise about Japan, its bureaucracy and its society.