Six Four, Hideo Yokoyama
Six Four, Hideo Yokoyama
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Six Four
A Novel

Author: Hideo Yokoyama, Jonathan Lloyd-Davies

Narrator: Richard Burnip

Unabridged: 24 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/07/2017


Synopsis

THE NIGHTMARE NO PARENT COULD ENDURE. THE CASE NO DETECTIVE COULD SOLVE. THE TWIST NO READER COULD PREDICT.

For five days, the parents of a seven-year-old Japanese schoolgirl sat and listened to the demands of their daughter’s kidnapper. They would never learn his identity. And they would never see their daughter alive again.

Fourteen years later, the mystery remains unsolved. The police department’s press officer—Yoshinobu Mikami, a former detective who was involved in the original case and who is now himself the father of a missing daughter—is forced to revisit the botched investigation. The stigma of the case known as “Six Four” has never faded; the police’s failure remains a profound source of shame and an unending collective responsibility.

Mikami does not aspire to solve the crime. He has worked in the department for his entire career, and while he has his own ambitions and loyalties, he is hoping simply to reach out to the victim’s family and to help finally put the notorious case to rest. But when he spots an anomaly in the files, he uncovers secrets he never could have imagined. He would never have even looked if he’d known what he would find.

An award-winning phenomenon in its native Japan—more than a million copies sold in its first week of publication, and the winner of the Best Japanese Crime Fiction of the Year award—and already a critically celebrated top-ten bestseller in the U.K., Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four is an unforgettable novel by a literary master at the top of his form. It is a dark and riveting plunge into a crime, an investigation, and a culture like no other.

About Hideo Yokoyama

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 behavior of his characters, and in January 2003 he was hospitalized following a heart attack brought about by working nonstop for seventy-two hours. Six Four is his sixth novel, and his first to be published in the English language, followed by Seventeen.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeffrey on March 14, 2019

"Turning, he saw the young girl, still half-concealed and watching him out of one eye. She had one hand over her mouth, trying to hold back laughter. An unspeakable emotion washed over him. He felt himself shiver. It was as though he’d caught a glimpse of himself through the girl’s eyes. The way he......more

Goodreads review by William2 on May 14, 2017

How do the police operate in Japan? This police procedural from author Hideo Yokoyama reads much differently than one would written by, say, Richard Price or Elmore Leonard. The usual human failings are on full display—incompetence, careerism, ambition, revenge, etc—but they are played out in a sett......more

Goodreads review by Adam on May 13, 2017

Unusual, long, methodical novel that is less thriller and more workplace drama, but is oddly gripping all the same. Yokoyama creates a whole ecosystem of police department intersections here, with Mikami, a likable hard-boiled protagonist, constantly moving between his job with the press, his former......more

Goodreads review by Liz on February 16, 2016

Six Four is really the most amazing read BUT you have to have patience. It is unexpected. I will be absolutely honest and say that at about 50 pages in (and this is a long one!) I almost gave up. If you get to that point kick yourself into continuing – it will reward you in many ways. From a little......more

Goodreads review by Sam on February 06, 2017

Six Four is a somewhat strange, slowly paced and bloated but nevertheless intriguing police procedural novel, following Press Director Mikami as he grapples with office politics, intersquad squabbling, hidden agendas and directives from Tokyo, and all against a backdrop of his own missing daughter a......more


Awards

  • Washington Post Best Books of the Year
  • New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
  • San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year