Hideo Yokoyama

Hideo Yokoyama is a Japanese crime novelist whose Six Four (Roku Yon, 2012) became the bestselling novel in Japan in its year of publication and an international sensation upon its English translation by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies. A former newspaper reporter, Yokoyama brings a journalist's immersion in bureaucratic procedure to his fiction — Six Four is as much about how institutions function, fail, and protect themselves as it is about crime.

The novel centres on a public affairs officer at a regional police station who becomes entangled in two seemingly unrelated cases from different decades. Yokoyama's prose is exhaustive in its detail and patience, demanding a reader willing to live inside a world of corridors and protocols — and then recompensing that patience with a final accumulation of revelation that is genuinely moving. His subsequent novel Seventeen offers a parallel immersion in the world of Japanese newspaper journalism.