Paper-pushing police novellas lack legwork

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/07/2019 (2590 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mystery author Hideo Yokoyama burst onto the English-language scene with his 2016 release, 6 4, from the 2012 Japanese original of the same name. At the story’s outset, a Tokyo police detective is investigating the cold case of a young missing girl from a decade earlier. But then another girl goes missing in a similar way — and it’s the detective’s own daughter.

It made a splash in English, as it had in Japan a few years earlier, though not necessarily for all the same reasons. Prefecture D is Yokoyama’s followup.

Gritty crime stories invite eager readers to mentally leave the comfort of their easy chairs into fictional versions of the sorts of seedy places and dangerous situations they are unlikely to experience personally.

In terms of importance, atmosphere comes right behind the important question of whodunit in a police procedural. It’s right up there with the captain demanding our hero turn in his gun and shield, because “you’ve gone too far, this time,” raising the stakes. The Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson made it big in the English-speaking world, albeit posthumously, in part because the tropes of good mystery thriller fiction are universal and he understood these tropes.

But Larsson may have been helped along because his foreign setting and perspective heightened the already exotic scenarios of a crime thriller. Questioning a suspect in a seedy, mob-frequented club? Works just as well, if not better, in Amsterdam or Monaco or Shanghai. And making the reader work to understand the complex political tightrope of a sensitive case is likewise even easier when they are immersed in an unfamiliar culture with different rules of behaviour. Yokoyama’s 6 4 may have worked so well in English for the same reasons.

But Prefecture D is a weird choice for a followup. You could call these four collected novellas police procedurals in that they are about police officers following procedures. But the four separate protagonists actually work in administration, solving problems related to personnel transfers, promotions and public relations, not solving crimes.

It’s a unique premise, truly. Criminal investigations are mentioned in passing, but they are backdrop to the real story — that of the grizzled veteran who was scheduled to retire and then decided not to, throwing staffing in disarray. Or the city councilman who has suggested he may ask an impolite question of the police captain at an upcoming municipal meeting, worrying the media folks.

It’s down to administrative schedulers and media managers to use the investigative skills they never got around to acquiring to understand and then manage or respond to these unexpected and taboo behaviours. The author frames these as mysteries but they aren’t, really, and the overblown titles — Season of Shadows, Cry of the Earth — make them even harder to take seriously.

Most importantly, foreign-language authors have proven that familiar crime thriller tropes are a lot fresher in an exotic locale with different cultural rules.

But Japanese rules of etiquette, hierarchy and formality muddle rather than enhance the story here. They are so key to the plot that character behaviours and story resolutions seem random and arbitrary to a reader unfamiliar with the unspoken rules. The translator tries to add context through inner monologues, but these feel wooden and false.

There is a sort of a theme here, about the need of the Japanese to save face. But it’s not really the theme, as this is a taken-for-granted aspect of Japanese culture that would not be so explicitly called out in this way for Japanese readers. It’s being treated as an ad hoc theme for English readers, but really, these novellas only have their basic setup and locale in common.

If you had to boil it down to a sentence or two, these four stories could be described as either police procedurals minus the police work, or a comedy of manners minus the humour or social context. Again, it’s a really unique literary experiment… not a successful one, at least in English.

Joel Boyce is a Winnipeg writer and educator.