A massive doorstopper of a thriller at well over 600 pages and a million plus copies bestseller in its native Japan. Beginning with the kidnapping and murder in 1989 of a seven-year old Tokyo schoolgirl which has never been solved and has brought shame on the police department then dealing with the case, the story moves fourteen years later to policeman Mikami who has been moved from CID to a lesser administrative PR position and takes it upon himself to revisit the crime, spurred on by his own sense of failure with his own teenage daughter and slowly begins to assemble the intricate pieces together until a shocking conclusion is reached with a twist you don't see coming. Slow building, meticulous in its insistence on unfolding all the procedural elements of a Japanese crime investigation and its political ramifications, this is a novel that insidiously grows on you until you are fully captive of its narrative flow and can't put it down.
International Bestseller - One of New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of the Year
Winner of the Best Japanese Crime Fiction of the Year AwardAn Award-Winning Phenomenon in Its Native Japan and Already a Critically Celebrated Top-Ten Bestseller in the United Kingdom, Hideo Yokoyama's Six Four is an Unforgettable Novel by a Literary Master at the Top of His Form. 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. "Already a bestseller in Japan and the United Kingdom, this cinematic crime novel suffused with fascinating cultural details follows a police department reinvestigating a chilling kidnapping that stumped them fourteen years earlier." --Entertainment Weekly's The Must List
