A massive doorstopper of a thriller at well over 600 pages and a million plus copies bestseller in its native Japan. Beginning with the kidnapping and murder in 1989 of a seven-year old Tokyo schoolgirl which has never been solved and has brought shame on the police department then dealing with the case, the story moves fourteen years later to policeman Mikami who has been moved from CID to a lesser administrative PR position and takes it upon himself to revisit the crime, spurred on by his own sense of failure with his own teenage daughter and slowly begins to assemble the intricate pieces together until a shocking conclusion is reached with a twist you don't see coming. Slow building, meticulous in its insistence on unfolding all the procedural elements of a Japanese crime investigation and its political ramifications, this is a novel that insidiously grows on you until you are fully captive of its narrative flow and can't put it down.
SIX FOUR. THE NIGHTMARE NO PARENT COULD ENDURE. THE CASE NO DETECTIVE COULD SOLVE. THE TWIST NO READER COULD PREDICT. 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 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.
'Not only is Six Four an addictive read, it is an education about Japan, its police and its society, and simply one of the best crime novels I have ever read.' -- David Peace
'Crime fiction aficionados constantly search for the next big thing, and this remarkable epic may just fit the bill. It is like nothing you have ever read in the genre, told in a narrative voice that is truly unique.' -- Barry Forshaw
Author
About Hideo Yokoyama
Hideo Yokoyama (Author) Born in 1957, Hideo Yokoyama worked for twelve years as an investigative reporter with a regional newspaper north of Tokyo, before becoming one of Japan's most acclaimed fiction writers. His exhaustive and relentless work ethic is known to mirror the intense and obsessive behaviour of his characters; and in January 2003 he was hospitalized following a heart attack brought about by working constantly for seventy-two hours. Six Four is his sixth novel, and his first to be published in the English language. Jonathan Lloyd-Davies (Translator) Jonathan Lloyd-Davies studied Japanese at Durham and Chinese at Oxford; he currently works as a translator of Japanese fiction. His translations include Edge by Koji Suzuki, with co-translator Camellia Nieh, the Demon Hunters trilogy by Baku Yumemakura, Gray Men by Tomotake Ishikawa, and Nan-Core by Mahokaru Numata. His translation of Edge received the Shirley Jackson award for best novel. Originally from Wales, he now resides in Tokyo.
