A review by hooliaquoolia
Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

4.0

I'm hesitant to label this a mystery novel, even though there are several mysteries in the plot. It vaguely aligns with what the Anglophone world has termed a "literary mystery" although there may not be a corollary in Japanese. It's more concerned with the systems in which these mysteries occur than solely with the mysteries themselves, and is more of an atmospheric read than a solved puzzle. That being said, this is mostly certainly a Japanese novel, and doesn't follow plot rhythms that are most familiar to readers of Anglophone mysteries. Maybe if I had grown up on Japanese novels like this, I wouldn't have minded the sheer amount of time spent on things like three bureaucrats preparing for a press conference, but as it was, there was a bit of a drag in the middle for me. As much as I enjoyed some of the plodding bits where the protagonist muses on the culture around him, Anglophone readers used to constant crime, corruption, and violence will not understand why the author spends hundreds of pages on a missing memo.