Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

  

Professional reviewers like Mark Lawson at the Guardian, along with the hordes of amateurs at Goodreads and Amazon, in commenting on Hideo Yokoyama's police procedural Six Four, have all remarked on one thing: how illuminating the book is about Japanese society. 

 Six Four makes the obvious clear: the police force is a bureaucracy. In focusing on how the pieces of that bureaucracy move (and grind against each other) in solving a crime—the disappearance of a young girl—we see the slow turning of bureaucratic wheels and also the rigid hierarchies that are certainly present in Japanese organizations. 

One suspects, however, that bureaucracies the world over, especially in quasi-military organizations like the police, are similar. So yes, the book is illuminating about Japanese society, but are the workings of Japanese bureaucracies so different from the workings of bureaucracies elsewhere? Since I haven't lived elsewhere for a long time, I'll leave that as an open question.

Unlike most police procedurals (but like most bureaucracies) this book, thanks to its focus on how things get done in a large organization, is very slow. This is not a bad thing, but it is a different experience than one might expect given the genre into which the book falls.

If, however, one has read Kaoru Takemura's Lady Joker, one may be less surprised. Takemura's massive tome, based on the still unsolved Glico Morinaga case, also focuses on the minutiae of how things get done, though she expands her view beyond the police department to include the press and the criminals. I don't read enough Japanese procedurals to know whether this slow attention to detail is a characteristic or a trend, or whether I just happened to pick up two novels similar in this way.

Both Six Four and Lady Joker are demanding reads. Both are well worth the effort.