On the case
Bureaucracy has been the target of much literary satire — think Dickens and Kafka, Melville’s Bartleby or Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s “The Time Regulation Institute” (if you haven’t read that one, go straight to your favorite local bookstore and order it).
But how often has a literary thriller’s suspense been driven by bureaucracy — not merely as backdrop, but as the very fuel of suspense?
Hideo Yokoyama’s “Six Four” — a 2012 Japanese best-seller, now arriving in the U.S. courtesy of Jonathan Lloyd-Davies’ translation — appears at first to be a standard detective story. The title refers to the 14-year-old case of a Tokyo schoolgirl, kidnapped for ransom and then murdered despite her parents’ delivering the money. The killer was never captured. The statute of limitations is about to go into effect.
The unsolved case continues to affect everyone who worked on it. Yoshinobu Mikami was one of the detectives on the case. After the failure to solve it, Mikami was transferred to Administrative Affairs. He hopes to return one day to Criminal Investigations; for now, he ambivalently heads Media Relations.
Mikami’s professional dissatisfaction is shadowed by personal tragedy. His teenage daughter, Ayumi, has run away from home. She has been missing for months, which imperils his marriage:
“Ayumi’s absence had brought into relief the parts of their relationship that lacked solidity; at the same time, it formed an unbreakable bond that held them together. She had provided them with a single goal, compelled them to take care of each other, forced them into praying that their relationship would hold out. Mikami wondered how long that would last.”
The action takes place in a province north of Tokyo, referred to here as “Prefecture D.” Early on, Mikami must manage a press corps infuriated by the police’s new policy on anonymous reporting. Meanwhile, he has to coordinate a photo-op visit by the Tokyo Head of Police, who wishes to commemorate the anniversary of the Six Four case by paying his respects to the murder victim’s father. The father, it becomes clear, had a falling out with the police, which prompts Mikami to revisit Six Four. What he discovers is increasingly troubling.
Despite pivoting on such a lurid event, “Six Four” contains neither violence nor explicit sexual reference. It is also very long, with a mind-boggling cast of characters whose echoing names will perplex Englishspeaking readers for the first 400 pages or so (this edition comes with a character key, but still). The set-up is meticulous, the pace slow at first — necessarily so.
Some readers will give up. They will miss out. As Yokoyama sends Mikami into the labyrinth of institutions — regulations and secrecy, office politics and power struggles — what emerges, surprisingly, is a tale of excruciating, deeply pleasurable suspense. The novel’s startling final act is simply masterful.
“Six Four” is also a fascinating portrait of contemporary Japan. Yokoyama spent 12 years as a reporter for a regional newspaper, experience that comes across in each scene. Late in the novel, for instance, Tokyo reporters descend on Prefecture D for a news conference:
“All of them looked at home. The confidence and arrogance that accumulated from travelling the country, hopping from one big case to the next, showed through in a shamelessness they weren’t even aware of.”
All of the institutions depicted in “Six Four” — press, police, government (and for that matter, marriage) — are presented as flawed. And yet, Mikami seeks not to blow things up, but to improve them. Some of this, no doubt, comes down to cultural difference. Still, it’s unusual to encounter a detective story whose protagonist is neither a cynic nor a romantic. And what is a cynic, anyway, but a grumpy, disillusioned romantic? Yokoyama rejects this falsifying lens. In so doing, he has created a thriller of surprising resonance.