In his Guardian review, Mark Lawson takes a look at Hideo Yokoyama's Six Four, the first of Yokoyama's crime thrillers to appear in an English translation. The book was published by Quercus, translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davides and read by Richard Burnip (the first two chapters are available in the above YouTube clip). As Lawson notes, the remarkable story of Six Four is the double-folded look at a novel that is at once a crime procedural in the vein of Stieg Larsson and also a tour guide of the cultural underbelly of Japan. But the story of the novel also extends beyond these genres:
Such details were presumably commonplace for Japanese readers; for a foreigner, they keep the cop novel unusually fresh and tense. But the book also has universal elements. After a brutal experience with bureacracy, Mikami reflects that “all organisations were the same”, and, as he uncovers various deceits and concealments by the police, Six Four serves as a handbook to how coverups have been run in governments, corporations and churches all over the world.