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 tha...