Six Four (64)
About This Book
My Personal Take
I approached 『64』with some trepidation. As someone who worked in Japanese media during the 1990s, I knew Yokoyama's reputation for unflinching portrayals of institutional dysfunction. What I wasn't prepared for was how personally the novel would affect me—not just as a reader, but as someone who had witnessed firsthand the kinds of institutional failures and cover-ups that Yokoyama dissects with surgical precision.
This isn't a mystery in the traditional sense. It's social realism disguised as a police procedural, a devastating examination of how institutions protect themselves at the expense of truth, justice, and the individuals trapped within them. Yokoyama doesn't just show us corruption; he shows us how decent people become complicit in systems that gradually erode their humanity.
What Makes This Special
The Anatomy of Institutional Failure
The novel follows Yoshinobu Mikami, a former detective now working in the police PR department, as he navigates the aftermath of a kidnapping case from 1989—the "Six Four" incident that gives the book its title. The case was never solved, and now, years later, it threatens to expose deeper institutional failures within the police force.
What makes this remarkable is how Yokoyama shows that the real crime isn't the original kidnapping—it's what the institution has done to protect itself in the years since. Cover-ups, scapegoats, destroyed evidence, ruined careers—all justified in the name of preserving the organization's reputation. It's a perfect microcosm of how power protects itself in modern Japan.
Cultural Context That Matters
The Police-Media Relationship: In Japan, the relationship between police and press is complex and highly structured. The "kisha club" system means that certain journalists have privileged access to police information in exchange for cooperation. Yokoyama, a former journalist himself, understands this system intimately and shows how it can be manipulated by both sides.
Hierarchy and Face: The concept of "mentsu" (face/reputation) drives every decision in the novel. Characters make choices not based on what's right, but on what preserves the organization's reputation. This reflects deep cultural values about group harmony and individual sacrifice that Western readers might find frustrating but that Japanese readers recognize as devastatingly accurate.
The Weight of the Past: The 1989 setting isn't arbitrary—it represents the end of the Showa era and Japan's transition into an uncertain future. The "Six Four" case becomes a symbol of unresolved problems from Japan's past that continue to poison its present.
Institutional Memory: Japanese organizations have long institutional memories, and past mistakes can haunt careers for decades. Yokoyama shows how this creates a culture of self-protection where admitting error becomes impossible, leading to ever-deeper cycles of deception.
The Human Cost
What devastated me most about this novel was its portrayal of the human cost of institutional failure. Mikami isn't a hero—he's a middle-aged bureaucrat trying to do his job while navigating impossible competing loyalties. He wants to serve justice, protect his colleagues, satisfy his superiors, and maintain his integrity. The novel shows, with relentless logic, why these goals are incompatible.
The secondary characters are equally complex: journalists who've grown too comfortable with their access, police officials who've forgotten why they became cops, victims' families whose grief has been weaponized for political purposes. Everyone is trapped in a system that rewards the wrong behaviors and punishes honesty.
A Fascinating Subplot: Mikami's Daughter
One of the most poignant subplots involves Mikami's daughter, who is being bullied at school because she takes after her father's rough, unpolished appearance. Yokoyama doesn't shy away from the cruel reality that looking like her "gorilla-faced" detective father makes her a target for teenage cruelty. This detail adds another layer to Mikami's burden—his very genetics have become a source of his child's suffering.
Here's a amusing tidbit about the film adaptation: when they made the movie, they cast a beautiful young idol actress in the daughter's role. This created quite a buzz among Japanese audiences who knew the book—imagine trying to believe that this stunning actress was being bullied for being ugly! It became a running joke among fans, highlighting the sometimes absurd gap between literary realism and cinema's need for attractive faces. Some viewers jokingly suggested the bullies must have had vision problems. It's one of those delightful instances where adaptation choices create unintended comedy.
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Experience Yokoyama's devastating portrayal of institutional failure and personal redemption.
📚 Get Your Copy on AmazonThe Translation Achievement
Jonathan Lloyd-Davies faces enormous challenges in translating this work. The novel is dense with police terminology, bureaucratic language, and subtle power dynamics that depend on understanding Japanese institutional culture. He succeeds remarkably well, preserving both the technical accuracy and the emotional impact.
Some cultural elements inevitably get simplified—the specific implications of certain ranks and positions, the nuanced ways that respect and authority are communicated through language—but Lloyd-Davies compensates by maintaining the claustrophobic atmosphere of institutional pressure that drives the narrative.
More Than a Police Procedural
While this novel contains elements of police procedure, it's really about something much larger: how institutions corrupt the people within them, and how individuals can find redemption even within corrupt systems. Yokoyama is interested in the moral choices people make when all their options are bad ones.
The novel also serves as a critique of modern Japanese society—its emphasis on group harmony over individual truth, its tendency to prioritize reputation over justice, its difficulty in confronting uncomfortable realities from the past. These aren't uniquely Japanese problems, but Yokoyama shows how they manifest in specifically Japanese ways.
The Pacing and Structure
At over 650 pages, this is not a quick read, and Yokoyama doesn't rush toward easy resolutions. The pacing is deliberate, building tension through accumulated detail rather than dramatic action. Western readers expecting the fast-paced plotting of American police thrillers may find it challenging, but the payoff is worth the investment.
The structure mirrors the bureaucratic world it depicts—methodical, thorough, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately revealing. Yokoyama understands that institutional dysfunction doesn't happen in dramatic moments; it happens through thousands of small compromises and gradual erosions of principle.
Why This Matters
This novel provides insight into aspects of Japanese society that are rarely explored in translated fiction. The inner workings of police bureaucracy, the complex relationship between law enforcement and media, the weight of institutional memory—these are the hidden mechanisms that shape modern Japan.
More universally, it's a powerful exploration of how good people can become complicit in bad systems, and how individual integrity can survive even when institutional integrity has collapsed. In our current era of institutional crises worldwide, these themes feel urgently relevant.
A Personal Note
Reading this novel was often uncomfortable for me because it reminded me of situations I'd witnessed during my own career in Japanese media. The casual corruption, the willingness to sacrifice truth for harmony, the way everyone becomes complicit in maintaining convenient fictions—Yokoyama captures all of this with painful accuracy.
But the novel also offers hope. Mikami's journey toward integrity, his willingness to risk everything for truth, his refusal to abandon his principles even when the system abandons him—these elements transform what could have been a cynical expose into something more profound: a meditation on moral courage in impossible circumstances.
Final Verdict
『64』is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand modern Japan beyond the surface impressions of efficiency and harmony. It's a novel that reveals the fault lines in Japanese society with unflinching honesty, while never losing sight of the human cost of institutional failure.
This isn't entertainment in any comfortable sense—it's serious literature that happens to use the framework of police procedure to explore deeper themes about power, corruption, and redemption. The pacing is deliberate, the moral questions are complex, and the resolutions are earned rather than given.
For readers interested in Japanese society, it's an invaluable window into aspects of the culture that are rarely examined so thoroughly. For fans of literary crime fiction, it's a masterclass in how genre elements can be used to explore serious themes. For anyone grappling with questions about institutional failure and individual responsibility, it's both disturbing and ultimately hopeful.
Just be prepared for a reading experience that will challenge your assumptions about justice, truth, and the price of institutional loyalty. This is a novel that stays with you long after the final page, continuing to raise questions about the moral choices we all make within the systems we inhabit.
Six Four
Translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies
More than a police procedural—a devastating portrait of institutional failure and personal redemption in modern Japan.
If You Enjoyed This...
Try Puppet Master for another examination of institutional failure and media manipulation, or explore Journey Under the Midnight Sun for more social commentary through crime fiction.