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Six Four: A Novel
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Author:
Yokoyama, Hideo
Translator:
Lloyd-Davies, Jonathan
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Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Age: Adult
LC: PL877.5
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ISBN-10: 0374265518
ISBN-13: 9780374265519
Brodart No: 115944710
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Language: English
Descriptors: Translation
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Demand: Hot
Print Run: 50000
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| Pub Date: 02/07/2017 |
| Availability: Available |
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| List: $28.00 |
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| Physical Description: |
566 pages ; 24 cm |
LCCN: |
2016027110 |
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LC Series: |
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| Brodart Sources: |
Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles |
Bibliographies: |
Los Angeles Times Bestsellers List |
| Starred Reviews: |
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Awards: |
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| TIPS Subjects: |
Mystery/Detective Fiction
Suspense/Thriller |
SEARS Subjects: |
Adventure fiction
Mystery fiction |
| LC Subjects: |
Cold cases (Criminal investigation), Fiction
FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General
Kidnapping, Investigation, Fiction
Mystery fiction
Police, Japan, Tokyo, Fiction |
Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 11/01/2016 |
| Publisher Annotation: For five days in January 1989, the parents of a seven-year-old Tokyo schoolgirl sat and listened to the demands of their daughter’s kidnapper. They would never learn his identity. They would never see their daughter again. For the fourteen years that followed, the Japanese public listened to the police’s apologies. They would never forget the botched investigation that became known as Six Four. They would never forgive the authorities for their failure. For one week in late 2002, the press officer attached to the police department in question confronted an anomaly in the case. He could never imagine what he would uncover. He would never have looked if he’d known what he would find. 576pp., 50K |
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| Journal Reviews |
| Booklist | 11/01/2016 |
| This is Yokoyama's sixth novel, the first to be published in English. Yokoyama, the "James Ellroy of Tokyo," is known for an exhaustive and relentless work ethic. He once brought on a heart attack by working nonstop for 72 hours. This intense drive is reflected in his extremely detailed style and carefully wrought characters. Six Four succeeds on several levels: as a police procedural, an incisive character study, and a cold-case mystery. However, this takes almost 600 pages to accomplish. A seven-year-old Tokyo schoolgirl was kidnapped in 1989, the kidnapper never identified, the girl never found. For years the police felt the disgrace of their botched investigation of case Six Four. Eager for promotion, Superintendent Yoshinobu Mikami has taken on a press-director position, although his heart is still in criminal investigation. When he uncovers an anomaly in the crime reports, he digs deeper, and it doesn't take long for him to realize that some doors are locked up tight for good reason. Recommended for libraries with a devoted international mystery following. Murphy, Jane. 576p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2016. |
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| BookPage | 02/01/2017 |
| Hideo Yokoyama's Six Four, translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies, is by no means just another mystery novel, but rather an award-winning cultural phenomenon on the scale of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. In its first week on sale in Japan, more than 1 million copies of Six Four were sold. The book went on to make its way solidly into the bestseller list in the U.K. All of that to say, there is a lot of buzz around this book, all of it well deserved. The story takes place in PrefectureP, a nonexistent Japanese city. The mystery has its roots in a crime that took place in the 1980s. A 7-year-old girl was kidnapped, and years later, the abduction and subsequent death of the child remains unsolved, a serious "loss of face" for the Prefecture P police department. The reinvestigation into the case falls to an unlikely candidate, Yoshinobu Mikami, for whom the case has a particular resonance: Mikami's own daughter has gone missing, and the poignant similarities between the cases are not lost on the canny detective. Further complicating matters is the internecine warfare between the administrative and investigative components of the police department. Each has an axe to grind, with both axes hanging directly over Mikami's outstretched neck. Yokoyama's prose is crisp and skillfully translated; the plot, while complicated, is thoroughly believable and compelling. This is a major book, one that will stay in your mind well after you have turned the last page. Bruce Tierney. 576p. BOOKPAGE, c2017. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 11/15/2016 |
| A bestselling Japanese crime novelist makes his American debut with a pensive but overlong whodunit that sheds light on power relations in his native country. It's 1989, the final year of Emperor Hirohito's reign, a time of portent, and a young girl has gone missing. A kidnapper calls, the police flail about, and parents and child never reunite. Time goes by, and now, in 2003, Yoshinobu Mikami is still thinking about the case, for, in a plot convenience that demands ample suspension of disbelief, his own daughter has gone missing. As Yokoyama's grim tale opens, Mikami and his wife are in the morgue, hoping against hope that the teenager lying on the table is not their daughter. "This wasn't their first time," writes Yokoyama, "in the last three months they had already viewed two bodies of Ayumi's age." Mikami is able to take a synoptic view because he had been an investigator in the earlier case, and now, reviewing the files, he sees something he had not noticed before. It's not really his place to be poking around, though, since he has been transferred to the press relations office of the police department, a job that he fears is a subtle, politically motivated demotion and a move that has soured any enthusiasm he had for being a cop. The jaded investigator is an old trope in crime fiction, but Yokoyama steals a page from Stieg Larsson by using the mystery to probe the ways the powers that be work in an apparently orderly society that masks a great undercurrent of evil and wrongdoing, much of it committed by the powerful and well-connected. So it is in this story, which takes leisurely twists into the well-kept offices of Japan's elite while providing a kind of informal sociological treatise on crime and punishment in Japanese society, to say nothing of an inside view of the police and their testy relationship with the media. Elaborate but worth the effort. Think Jo Nesbo by way of Haruki Murakami, and with a most satisfying payoff. 576pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2016. |
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| Library Journal | 01/20/2017 |
| In 1989, a Tokyo schoolgirl is kidnapped, but the negotiations are botched, leaving the kidnapper at large and the victim dead. Fourteen years later, Det. Yoshinobu Mikami, who had been involved in the initial investigation and who is now working in media relations, is pulled back into the cold case, labeled "Six Four," when the top brass plan a photo op around the crime. In tracing the tragic events, Mikami talks to suspects, and even the victim's family, slowly realizing that police politics, the personal tragedy of his own missing daughter, and the old 64 case are connected. Uncovering the truth and delivering justice is hard fought. Verdict A best seller in Japan, Yokoyama's English-language debut is a complex procedural that takes time to get into high gear as it follows its detective sifting through the evidence while mired in his department's bureaucratic intricacies and office politics. [See Prepub Alert, 8/16/16.]-Ron Samul, New London, CT. 576p. LJ Xpress Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2017. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 08/15/2016 |
| Yokoyama's English-language debut comes well recommended. It sold a million copies in Japan in six heady days; it's short-listed for the Crime Writers' Association International Dagger, and the Guardian described it as a "binge read." As it opens, a press officer with the Tokyo police looks into a notoriously botched kidnapping case dating from 1989, now called Six Four and involving a seven-year-old Tokyo schoolgirl never seen again. What he finally discovers really twists the story around. Barbara Hoffert. 576p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2016. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 12/05/2016 |
| Japanese author Yokoyama makes his U.S. debut with a massive and complex police procedural set in 2003 in one of Japan's prefectures. Supt. Yoshinobu Mikami, who has been transferred from criminal investigations to media relations at Prefecture D Police Headquarters, must contend with unhappy members of the press who feel that the police are too selective in what they choose to share. The multilayered plot involves the unsolved kidnapping and murder of a seven-year-old girl 14 years before, physical confrontations between reporters and police, and the discordant relationships among various elements of the police force. Meanwhile, Mikami agonizes over his teenage daughter, Ayumi, who has been missing for weeks. American readers may have trouble following the bewildering conflicts and alliances, but they should gain a better understanding of a very different culture. This is a novel that requires and rewards close attention. The ending is oddly satisfying, though none of the underlying issues are truly resolved. (Feb.). 576p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2016. |
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