Hideo Yokoyama's Books

Biography

Born in Tokyo in 1957, Hideo Yokoyama is one of Japan’s most successful crime writers. His books have sold a million copies within a week of their publication.

A Youthful Start

Yokoyama took a traditional route into crime fiction. From an early age, he started to write.

“When I was in elementary school, I was called the “library king”… After reading “Treasure Island”, I rewrote the ending; I thought it was sad that the adventure was over. I created a new monster swimming around seven seas, far scarier than Captain Hook.” (Webdoku)

After graduating from Tokyo International University, Yokoyama worked for 12 years for a local paper. Here he was both an investigative reporter and an editor.

Early Success

He struck out as a freelance writer in 1991 after winning an “Honourable Mention” in the Suntory Mystery Award. (Donna Leon won the prize that year). After his initial success, the awards started to flow. His most notable win was The Konomys Award. Konomys is a contraction of the award’s full name, “Kono Mystery ga Sugoi!” which translates, rather pleasingly, into “This Mystery is Amazing!”. This is an annual prize given to the ten best domestic and ten best international mystery novels published in Japan. Yokoyama’s novel Han’ochi was the most amazing mystery of 2003.

Yokoyama’s award-winning wasn’t without some controversy. In 2003 Han’ochi was also selected for the Naoki Prize though ultimately, it lost out. One of the judges showed that a plot mechanism about a bone marrow transplant was impossible. This caused quite a stir in the Japanese literary world with the author and critics alike condemning the decision. It goes to show that what one critic finds amazing, another will find implausible.

Six Four

In 2012, after a seven-year gap, Yokoyama published Rokuyon (Six Four). It was an overnight success, selling millions of copies and won Yokoyama his second Konomys award. Tokyo-based writer David Peace persuaded his publishers to buy the rights, and it became Hideo’s first work to be translated into English. It is now available in twenty languages. Since then, two other novels, Seventeen and Prefecture D have also been translated. Six Four was the first novel by an Asian writer to be nominated for the Crime Writers’ Association’s International Dagger.

Dysfunctional Organisations

Hideo Yokoyama’s books are unlike mainstream crime fiction. For twelve years he shadowed his local police force. His experience showed him how bureaucratic and dysfunctional large organisations could become. Yokoyama doesn’t focus on a crime and its solution; he uncovers the conflicts and power struggles that human nature creates in large organisations. His strength is his depiction of the hierarchy, politics and hypocrisy within Japan’s police force.

His stories are about infringements of protocol and political correctness, not solving crimes.

“I reflect a lot on subordinate evil in large organisations. There is a stagnant power system that multiplies fear and the desire to look good to the point that it generates evil where it never would have existed.” (Teller Report)

Bureaucracy Sells

So why do slightly dry novels about organisational politics sell in their millions? Is this state of affairs unique to Japan?

“The Japanese value collaboration. In the West, individualism is more common, and perhaps a character like Mikami, who suffers inside an organisation, is alien to them. But I suspect that nobody lives outside custom and practice, so I’d like to be able to ask my foreign readers if that part of my novels is universal”. (Teller Report)

If you have worked in something as innocuous as local government, let alone a power-crazed FTSE 100, you may see the parallels. Try one of Yokoyama’s novels and find out.