Prefecture D: Four Novellas

by Hideo Yokoyama, Jonathan Lloyd-Davies (Translator)

Overview

A collection of tense thrilllers, each centered on a mystery and the unfortunate officer tasked with solving it, set in the world of Hideo Yokoyama's bestselling Six Four.

Four novellas: Each taking place in 1998.

SEASON OF SHADOWS
"The force could lose face . . . I want you to fix this." Personnel's Futawatari receives a horrifying memo forcing him to investigate the behavior of a legendary detective with unfinished business.


CRY OF THE EARTH
"It's too easy to kill a man with a rumor." Shinto of Internal Affairs receives an anonymous tip-off alleging a station chief is visiting the red-light district—a warning he soon learns is a red herring.


BLACK LINES
"It was supposed to be her special day." Section Chief Nanao, responsible for the force's forty-nine female officers, is alarmed to learn her star pupil has not reported for duty and is believed to be missing.


BRIEFCASE
"We need to know what he's going to ask." On the eve of a routine debate, Political Liaison Tsuge learns a wronged politician is preparing his revenge. He must now quickly dig up dirt to silence him.

Prefecture D continues Hideo Yokoyama's exploration of the themes of obsession, saving face, office politics, and interdepartmental conflicts. Placing everyday characters between a rock and a hard place and then dialing up the pressure, he blends and balances the very Japanese with the very accessible, to spectacular effect.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374237042
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/10/2020
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	601,828
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Born in 1957, Hideo Yokoyama worked for twelve years as an investigative reporter with a regional newspaper north of Tokyo before becoming one of Japan’s most acclaimed and bestselling fiction writers. Prefecture D is his third book to be translated into English.

Jonathan Lloyd-Davies studied Japanese at the University of Durham and Chinese at Oxford. His translations include Edge by Koji Suzuki, with cotranslator Camellia Nieh; the Psyche Diver trilogy by Baku Yumemakura; Gray Men by Tomotake Ishikawa; and Nan-Core by Mahokaru Numata; and Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama. His translation of Edge received the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Originally from Wales, he now resides in Tokyo.

Editorial Reviews

08/10/2020

The four novellas in Yokoyama’s disappointing collection, set in 1998 in the same fictional universe as his kidnap thriller, Six Four, all focus on members of the Japanese police. In “Season of Shadows,” the administrative branch of the Prefecture D police headquarters is in a tizzy after Michio Osakabe, a respected senior officer who once headed criminal investigations, announces that he’s going back on his plans to resign; his change of heart now jeopardizes a chain of anticipated personnel moves. Shinji Futawatari, who works in administration, is tasked with finding out why. The logical answer fails to compel, and a reliance on coincidence vitiates the emotional impact. The three other entries include the search for a missing female officer and a desperate attempt to find out what “bombshell” a politician intends to make public. None of the characters are memorable, and the answers to the questions driving them are largely anticlimactic. Yokoyama won’t win any new fans with this one. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"[Yokoyama's] novellas wring soulful suspense out of cop office politics . . . Yokoyama's characters are not lost but adrift, swept up in inner longing, dissatisfied with or even broken by many of the aspects of their lives . . . For Yokoyama the [police] department is first and foremost a political landscape . . . Fascinating."
—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"A regional Japanese police precinct in 1998 is the setting of Prefecture D, a quartet of novellas by Hideo Yokoyama. These four tales explore the satisfactions, frustrations, and base and noble emotions of those who devote their lives to a profession where saving face is a priority and ethical conundrums are a frequent challenge. Yokoyama, a journalist-turned-author whose novel Six Four was published in American in 2017 to much acclaim, immerses us in an environment at once familiar and exotic; his stories' mysteries are solved in a manner that surprises the mind and moves the heart."
—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

"[Yokoyama is] the dean of Japanese noir . . . Fans of hard-boiled fiction will enjoy seeing how Japanese cop shops work."
—Kirkus Reviews [starred review]

"[Yokoyama] somehow manages to pack each approximately 80-page story with the same amount of intensity as his epic-scale fiction."
—Booklist

"Compelling . . . Both [Prefecture D and Six Four] easily stand alone, but to read both offers enhancing insights. . . Each novella presents a mystery that exposes the labyrinthine relationships within Prefecture D's sprawling police department . . . Yokoyama's dozen years' experience as an investigative journalist undoubtedly enhances his already sharp fiction with unexpected minutiae that proves essential."
—Shelf Awareness

From the Publisher

★ 2020-07-14
Linked novellas from the dean of Japanese noir.

Yokoyama knows his way around a police station, as these linked novellas, reminiscent of Janwillem van de Wetering’s Amsterdam Cops series, suggest. Yet a Japanese police station is a place that’s thoroughly politicized and bureaucratic. A constant presence in each of the stories is a personnel director named Shinji Futawatari, whom everyone fears because he has unusually broad powers to reassign people to different jobs, elevating some and demoting others. “Fortunately,” writes Yokoyama, “it was a particular strength of Personnel to nurture posts that were both impenetrable and obscure, enabling transfers that were recognizable from the inside as punitive yet justifiable to the outside as existing to 'strengthen Department X or Y.' ” Futawatari’s life is made miserable by a 42-year veteran detective who refuses to be shuffled from his post for reasons that, a detective ventures, have something to do with “all that other shit.” The veteran cop, who could teach Bartleby the Scrivener a thing or two, won’t talk about it or consider a transfer, leaving Futawatari frustrated and powerless. In the next story, Futawatari—who’d been named a superintendent at the age of 40 and is nicknamed the “ace,” not for his skills but as “a reference to the trump card he held”—is a peripheral player in a cat-and-mouse game in which an anonymous cop is blackmailing a senior officer. The same threat plays in the fourth story, with a politician threatening to expose another top cop, sending the prefecture scrambling to dig up dirt. When Masaki Tsuge, who works in the Prefectural Police Headquarters, pleads on his boss’s behalf, the politico answers, smugly, “If you’re this good at kowtowing, you might want to consider running for election.” The story that precedes it is the most elusive, in which a promising woman sergeant in a deeply sexist enterprise—as Yokoyama writes, “Questions of gender aside, she was exactly the type of officer the force needed”—simply disappears from her station one day.

There’s more politics than mayhem here, but fans of hard-boiled fiction will enjoy seeing how Japanese cop shops work.

Kirkus Reviews