Award-winning Japanese author Akinari Asakura’s The Final Six, translated into English by Australian literary translator Haydn Trowell, is a tense psychological thriller about ambition, secrets and finding humanity amid cutthroat corporate competition and a scathing hiring process.

Of the thousands of people who applied for the graduate program at Japan’s most exclusive tech company, Spiralinx, only six candidates make it to the final stage. The six become close, even friends, because they were under the impression they had all been chosen to begin their careers at Spiralinx. But when the hiring process suddenly changes, the six must now choose one of them to be the only one hired. In their last interview, where they are locked in a room with nothing but six envelopes that contain their darkest, most reputation-ruining secrets, we see to what desperate lengths some would go for the job they want.

With the first half of the novel a gripping locked-room mystery, and the second half debunking what happened in that last interview, Asakura shows humans at their lowest, and then opens up the possibilities for redemption. What is strikingly distinct about this mystery compared to others is that it steps back from the individuals – their background stories and their motives, etc. – and targets the bigger picture instead. Asakura, with careful detail and precision in every word, delivers the ultimate ‘hate the game, not the player’ thriller, condemning how cutthroat job hunting is, how unfair the hiring process can be, and questioning how much we can truly learn from someone at a first glance. Is one interview really enough to understand a person, their capabilities and strengths? Is one slight failure really enough to be tossed aside?

Through the extreme scenarios our protagonists are forced into, Asakura nonetheless highlights a common problem experienced by many – how we handle ourselves after rejection, and how we proceed from there.