Japanese novels are notoriously poorly-edited. The way you receive them is often very close to the way the author wrote them, with very few changes. This is sometimes polished up in translation, but in the case of Six Four this would not have been possible without major changes. Six Four is, I believe, two very good novels posing as one. With a little restructuring this could be very different. In fact it was published in Japan as two novels, as is standard for a novel this size. It would certainly be unwieldy to read a novel like this in Japan's small paperback format. I feel that dividing the experience of reading Six Four into two parts would make for a much more exciting read, that wouldn't drag in the war that Six Four occasionally does in pursuit of its intriguing, and surprising, conclusion. Still, as police procedurals go, this is both a wonderful read, and an excellent window for Western readers into Japanese crime fiction and how its police service operetes. The book (or books) sold over 1.3 milion copies in Japan, making Six Four one of the most popular examples of Japanese crime fiction is its native country.