Six Four

Mystery of The Missing Girls

Six Four is Japanese author Hideo Yokoyama’s first book to be translated into English (by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies), and went on to become a bestseller.  The book is a dense and serious police procedural that plays out more in the protagonist’s mind, as he juggles multiple problems.

Yoshinobu Mikami and his wife are in anguish over their missing daughter; they have to repeatedly go over the trauma of looking at corpses of young women to check it’s their Ayumi. Mikami was pulled out of criminal investigation and put into media relations, a post where he is uncomfortable and dreams of getting back to being a real cop.

The case that runs through the book is an old kidnap-murder of a seven-year-old girl, Shoko Amamaya.  Her father had paid the ransom, still the child was found dead. The unsolved case that fascinated the country,  is a blot on the police department, and a large contingent of detectives continues to work on trying to trace the killer, in the case codenamed Six Four.

As press director, Mikami has to deal with a rowdy bunch of reporters, and his first battle with them involves withholding the name of a female driver in an accident case. The reporters demand the names of the woman and the victim, which Mikami cannot reveal due to instructions given by his superiors. It creates an ugly scene between the cops and the press, and they threaten to boycott the visit by the police commissioner from Tokyo. He is visiting on the anniversary of Shoko’s death and hopes to pay his respects at the Amamaya residence. The press boycott would mean major embarrassment for Mikami’s department.

Meanwhile, the still-grieving father politely turns down the commissioner’s visit too, which puts the harried Mikami into more trouble. In trying to find out why Amamaya turned against the cops, Mikami stumbles upon a “Koda Memo” that hints at a blunder in the Shoko case, followed by a cover-up endorsed by higher-ups in the police force.

As Mikami gradually uncovers the conspiracy, the book moves at a languid pace, taking in the minutiae of how the cops work, as well as the internal politics and rivalry between departments. Yokoyama lays bare corruption in the force along with that deep sense of honour entrenched in the Japanese psyche.  The prose is simple with no embellishment; there are too many characters and strands of the story, that somehow get connected, like an immense jigsaw puzzle.

Apart from the hunt for Shoko, and later, the race against time to catch a killer, there is very little action in Six Four. It would take a lot of patience to get through Mikami’s complex investigation, but it always remains gripping and the twist at the end is a zinger.

Yokoyama used to be an investigative reporter with a Tokyo newspaper before turning to fiction, so in this novel he gets the machinations going on between the ‘Press Club’ and the police just right. It’s a thick, sprawling, richly detailed novel, the success of which will undoubtedly result in more of his books being translated. 

Six Four

By Hideo Yokoyama

Translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies 

Publisher: Quercus

Pages: 600