Until 2012, Haruki Murakami had the best sales record of a novel in Japan, of such a high magnitude that it seemed that no one could surpass it.
The first volume of his
1Q84
diptych
,
released in 2009, had shipped a million copies in the first month, a feat that underpinned his status as the most popular writer in his country and the main reference of contemporary Japanese literature in the West.
But then
Six Four
came along
, a dry style crime novel with a stuffy atmosphere, and Murakami's record was shattered.
Six Four
also sold a million, but in the first week
.
Its author, Hideo Yokoyama, tells us by email that, despite everything, this should not surprise us.
"Mystery novels", he explains, "
have taken root in Japan, they are the most popular genre and the engine of the literary sector
.
"
Even so, they are not easy to find in other languages.
There is a small part of
Japanese
noir
that can be read in Spanish -from the pioneer of the social current in the 50s, Seicho Matsumoto, to authors closer in time such as Natsuo Kirino, Keigo Higashino or Shuichi Yoshida-, but
in comparison With the volume of the local market, the percentage is minimal
.
In fact, prior to the publication of
Six Four
, Yokoyama had written six more novels and several books of short stories, but none had left the Japanese ecosystem until Tokyo-based writer David Peace urged his publisher in London to contract the rights in English.
In the following four years, Yokoyama's work has appeared in up to 20 languages and is now published in Spanish through Salamandra.
It has not been an easy task:
Six Four
adds 650 pages of an enunciative crudeness that can recall the dry style of James Ellroy, and in which the deeply Japanese theme is manifested, which most worries its author: "The conflict between the organization [the state, society, company] and the individual ".
Six Four
is the story of a commissioner, Yoshinobu Mikami, overwhelmed by two problems: the reopening of an old case of
kidnapping and murder of a girl that occurred in the year 64 of the Showa era -
our 1989, the last of the reign of Emperor Hirohito -, and the disappearance in the present of his own daughter in similar circumstances.
Mikami is not a detective, but the person in charge of relations between the police and the press, but the conflict hits him to the full: at the request of his superiors he must get involved in both cases and hide information from journalists.
Hideo Yokoyama SALAMANDER
"My characters", Yokoyama details, "carry a heavy mental load, and that is why they live the purest conflicts.
I am not talking about what is important for society, but about what is important for the individual
."
That is the key to its magnetism, which has begun to fascinate millions of fans of crime fiction.
"I transform a public case into a private problem, because I believe that the worst storm is the one that occurs in a glass of water."
Before turning to literature, Hideo Yokoyama (Tokyo, 1957) was an event editor at
Jomo Shimbun,
a regional newspaper in Gunma prefecture, north of the capital.
There is a lot of the old journalist in
Six-four
, as one of his themes is the opaque management of information from power - "you have the international image of Japan as a country where
freedom of expression is limited
, and it is something that I have felt many times and that has taken away my sleep, "he says, while criticizing the
systematic violation of the press of people's privacy
.
"The good thing about a novel," Yokoyama continues, "is that your freedom is expanded. There is no such fear of offending or that desire to please the authorities," and thus it presents a Japanese society with many shades of gray.
It is this blurred morality that allows him to connect with readers from other cultures.
In fact, in
Six Four
one perceives
a mental Japan rather than a specific geographical space
.
The novel is set in an imaginary region -prefecture D-, far from the big cities and surrounded by a mountainous environment;
it could be Takayama, or Niigata, although Yokoyama prefers not to give specific geographic locations.
What interests him is not the exterior of the plot, but how events eat up the interior of people.
"It is difficult to define human evil," he reflects.
"
Is a psychopath evil? I am interested in the spark that ignites that evil
. As the digital society expands, that will becomes more visible, which grows unstoppably, and makes us doubt whether we also have the will within to do evil ".
I. KATO
One of their anxieties is that bad actions are not always voluntary, and that they can sometimes be reached without realizing it.
"I reflect a lot on subordinate evil in a large organization," he continues.
"There is
a stagnant power system that multiplies fears and the desire to look good
to the point of generating evil where it never would have existed."
Japan maintains a low crime rate, and this statistical rarity is what surely brings Japanese readers closer to the crime novel, as a showcase for exotic events or a reflection of
repressed impulses
.
But, at the same time, Yokoyama senses that it is the good part of man that pushes us to read these kinds of stories.
"The Japanese value collaboration," he reflects.
"In the West individualism is more developed, and perhaps a character like Mikami, who suffers within an organization, is strange to them. But I think that
no one in the world can live outside customs
and I would like to be able to ask my readers abroad if really that aspect of my novels is universal ".
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