Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama
Published 2012 · 566 pages · 170,000 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Mystery & Crime, Thriller & Suspense
How hard is Six Four to read?
Six Four scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Japanese bureaucratic and police terminology in translation. Dense with institutional language.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Institutional analysis operates at a higher level of abstraction than typical procedurals.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Extremely dense with bureaucratic detail, character relationships, and political maneuvering within the department.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- The true significance of events often becomes clear only in retrospect. Information arrives obliquely through office politics.
- Symbolic density: 30 out of 100
- The kidnapping case serves as a symbolic weight, but Yokoyama works through realist detail rather than symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Mikami's awareness of institutional absurdity provides some ironic perspective, tempered by genuine emotional investment.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- Both the cold case and the bureaucratic conflict withhold resolution until the final act.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Two interleaved plotlines—the office politics and the cold case—with Mikami's family drama as a third thread.
How Six Four is regarded
Six Four holds a literary regard score of 46 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.