Hideo Yokoyama
Auteur de Six Four
A propos de l'auteur
Crédit image: pulled from the New York Times Book Review website.
Œuvres de Hideo Yokoyama
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Hideo Yokoyama
- Nom légal
- 横山 秀夫
- Date de naissance
- 1957-01-17
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- Japan
- Lieu de naissance
- Tokyo, Japan
- Professions
- journalist
Membres
Critiques
I am glad I read this but it was a difficult read. The pacing was incredibly slow and I felt that information about Japanese police procedure was often repeated unnecessarily. It was a mystery but just barely. It spent just as much time on the culture of police and its relationship to the press. Sometimes it was so slow I thought about giving up but then something great would explode onto the page. Overall I would call this a 3.5 and worth a read. the brilliant parts made up for the slow parts.
Hideo Yokoyama's Seventeen centres on the JAL 123 airline disaster in 1985. Yuuki is an unambitious local news reporter who is unwillingly tapped to head his newspaper's coverage of the disaster. This event forces him to cancel a planned climbing trip, with unexpected consequences. Seventeen years later Yuuki is once again set upon performing this climb, this time as a middle-aged man.
Yuuki's attempts to do this gigantic story justice meet resistance from all quarters, and he ends up in a series of escalating confrontations as he tries to do the right thing in terms of both the gravity of the event and the impact on bereaved families and survivors. His chosen methods get a lot of his more conservative management and colleagues offside, and he begins to question his own motives and effectiveness.
While he is caught up in this drama, Yuuki also has to deal with family troubles and a crisis with one of his friends.
As with Six Four, Yokoyama excels at capturing the internecine office politics in Japanese companies. In his preceding book, the political games were being played out with a police media liaison officer and crime reporters; this time his setting is within a regional newspaper office. Yokoyama is a former journalist himself, which lends his story significant verisimilitude. This is a very different and affecting novel.… (plus d'informations)
Yuuki's attempts to do this gigantic story justice meet resistance from all quarters, and he ends up in a series of escalating confrontations as he tries to do the right thing in terms of both the gravity of the event and the impact on bereaved families and survivors. His chosen methods get a lot of his more conservative management and colleagues offside, and he begins to question his own motives and effectiveness.
While he is caught up in this drama, Yuuki also has to deal with family troubles and a crisis with one of his friends.
As with Six Four, Yokoyama excels at capturing the internecine office politics in Japanese companies. In his preceding book, the political games were being played out with a police media liaison officer and crime reporters; this time his setting is within a regional newspaper office. Yokoyama is a former journalist himself, which lends his story significant verisimilitude. This is a very different and affecting novel.… (plus d'informations)
*** This review contains a spoiler ***
Mikami is the director of Media Relations in a regional Japanese police prefecture, a job that he holds reluctantly, being a detective at heart. His job is made difficult by a recalcitrant press pack kicking up a stink over transparency, and his home life has been fraught since his daughter disappeared without a trace.
In the midst of all this, Mikami is told that the Commissioner is visiting from Tokyo and wants to make an announcement about the prefecture's most notorious case - codenamed Six Four - the abduction and murder of a seven-year-old girl that has been unsolved for 14 years. Mikami was involved in this case during his early years on the force. The Commissioner wants to visit the girl's father and make a staged press announcement in front of his house.
Nobody will tell Mikami why the Commissioner is coming and what this announcement will be. Knowing that he cannot embarrass the Commissioner, he does everything he can to find out, uncovering a can of worms full of police politics and cover-ups. At the same time, his team needs to get the obstreperous Press gallery onside as fast as possible so they will cover the Commissioner's visit appropriately, and they show no signs of co-operating.
This book excels as an exposition of Japanese police procedures and the complex culture that they operate in. Hierarchies, face and respect are vital concerns that Mikami must navigate to get at the truth. The role and conduct of formal apologies in the police's relationship with the public is revealed, something that I've not read of anywhere else.
The plot has a few very good twists but I think that, at 640 pages, it is longer than it needs to be. I also found it a bit confusing and difficult to follow. There is a large number of characters with similar names, and I had trouble keeping in mind who was who.There is a reason for that, related to the plot, but I still think it was too confusing and marred my enjoyment of the book.
Overall this is a very different kind of police procedural, both due to the Japanese culture that it goes into, and the fact that the protagonist is working from the press relations point of view rather than as an investigator. That's a unique device in my experience.… (plus d'informations)
Mikami is the director of Media Relations in a regional Japanese police prefecture, a job that he holds reluctantly, being a detective at heart. His job is made difficult by a recalcitrant press pack kicking up a stink over transparency, and his home life has been fraught since his daughter disappeared without a trace.
In the midst of all this, Mikami is told that the Commissioner is visiting from Tokyo and wants to make an announcement about the prefecture's most notorious case - codenamed Six Four - the abduction and murder of a seven-year-old girl that has been unsolved for 14 years. Mikami was involved in this case during his early years on the force. The Commissioner wants to visit the girl's father and make a staged press announcement in front of his house.
Nobody will tell Mikami why the Commissioner is coming and what this announcement will be. Knowing that he cannot embarrass the Commissioner, he does everything he can to find out, uncovering a can of worms full of police politics and cover-ups. At the same time, his team needs to get the obstreperous Press gallery onside as fast as possible so they will cover the Commissioner's visit appropriately, and they show no signs of co-operating.
This book excels as an exposition of Japanese police procedures and the complex culture that they operate in. Hierarchies, face and respect are vital concerns that Mikami must navigate to get at the truth. The role and conduct of formal apologies in the police's relationship with the public is revealed, something that I've not read of anywhere else.
The plot has a few very good twists but I think that, at 640 pages, it is longer than it needs to be. I also found it a bit confusing and difficult to follow. There is a large number of characters with similar names, and I had trouble keeping in mind who was who.
Overall this is a very different kind of police procedural, both due to the Japanese culture that it goes into, and the fact that the protagonist is working from the press relations point of view rather than as an investigator. That's a unique device in my experience.… (plus d'informations)
Listes
Prix et récompenses
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Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 17
- Membres
- 1,093
- Popularité
- #23,509
- Évaluation
- 3.5
- Critiques
- 50
- ISBN
- 83
- Langues
- 13
Tornando al romanzo, sono molto contenta che mi avessero messo in guardia sul fatto che i gialli nipponici sono piuttosto diversi da quelli che siamo abituatз a leggere da queste parti: essendo Sei Quattro su un vecchio caso, ci si potrebbe aspettare che il protagonista indaghi, abbia delle intuizioni geniali e/o la fortuna di incrociare la prova giusta e riesca a risolverlo. Invece no: Mikami Yoshinobu è il capo dell’ufficio stampa e deve solo recuperare i buoni rapporti con la famiglia della vittima di questo vecchio caso irrisolto in modo da permettere alla polizia di farsi della buona pubblicità.
Una larga fetta di Sei Quattro quindi ruota intorno ai rapporti tra polizia e stampa, rapporti che Yokoyama deve conoscere bene, visto che ha lavorato per più di dieci anni come giornalista d’inchiesta. Ci sono pagine e pagine nelle quali ci si interroga su dove finisca il diritto di cronaca e inizi il diritto alla privacy, sul diritto dellз giornalistз di avere tutte le informazioni in modo da poter valutare cosa pubblicare e cosa no e il diritto della polizia a trattenere qualunque elemento ritenga troppo sensibile, ma con il rischio che ometta informazioni compromettenti.
Tutto questo gestito da un uomo che sente il suo ruolo di capo dell’ufficio stampa come una punizione perché vorrebbe tornare sul campo. Mikami, infatti, è un uomo che non riesce ad accettare la situazione nella quale si trova: di padre di una figlia scomparsa e che non riesce a capire, di capo dell’ufficio stampa che deve avere a che fare con un padre di una figlia assassinata in un crimine ancora senza colpevole condannato e di marito di una donna che dopo tanti anni di matrimonio ancora non sa perché si è sposata proprio con lui.
Tuttavia, sarà proprio in questa condizione di uomo perso e demoralizzato che capirà l’importanza di incontrare la persona di cui abbiamo bisogno e l’umiltà di ammettere che, per quanto si ami qualcunǝ, quella persona speciale potremmo non essere noi. Magari noi siamo la persona giusta al momento giusto per unǝ perfettǝ sconosciutǝ e in quel caso è importante non rifiutarne la responsabilità per non lasciare che tutto scivoli nell’indifferenza e per tenere in vita la fiamma della solidarietà umana.
Sei Quattro è un romanzo lento e a tratti sembra assolutamente inconcludente, ma alla fine ogni elemento è funzionale e porta a farsi l’unica domanda importante: non “chi è stato?”, ma “come sta ogni personaggio toccato da questo terribile caso?”.… (plus d'informations)