Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama (Riverrun)

First published in Japanese as Climber’s High by Bungei Shunju Ltd in 2003. It was also adapted into a film of the same name in 2008. Seventeen is Hideo Yokoyama’s second novel to be published in English, his first being the crime/mystery novel Six Four. The story is set in two time frames - 1985 and 2002 and blends fiction with an actual event. Yokoyama uses his background as an investigative journalist and creates a story of a small-town journalist covering one of Japan’s worst airline disasters.

On August 12, 1985, Japan Airlines Flight 123 from Haneda Airport to Osaka crashed in a mountainous area of Gunma Prefecture killing the entire fifteen-member crew and 504 of the 509 passengers. It is considered one of the deadliest single-aircraft accidents in aviation history. In his foreword, Yokoyama relates what he witnessed at the crash site. 

“I arrived at the crash site after trekking for more than eight hours up a mountain with no routes or climbing trails. The terrain was steep, unimaginably narrow, and it was the rare lucky reporter who didn’t inadvertently step on a corpse. After sundown, I spent a night on the mountain, surrounded by body parts that no longer resembled anything human”.

Kazumasa Yuuki is a veteran reporter for the North Kanto Times, a local newspaper based in Gunma Prefecture. For years he worked the police beat. Although he is married and has two children, he is away from home most of the time and is estranged from his thirteen-year old son Jun. The story opens with Kazu getting off a train at the base of Mount Tanigawa, also known as the Devil’s Mountain. He was supposed to climb the Tsuitate Face with his friend Kyoichiro Anzai seventeen years ago and still wonders about the last words he heard his friend say, “I climb up to step down.”

Seventeen years ago, on the day Yuuki was getting ready to climb the mountain, a wire from the news service came in stating that, “It appears that Japan Air Lines Flight 123 has crashed on the Nagano-Gunma prefectural border.”  The newspaper office goes into turmoil and Yuuki is assigned as the JAL Crash Desk Chief. This tragedy brings the newsroom together and there are high hopes for the paper to get a real scoop before all the national publications. 

What follows is an adrenaline-filled chaos as Yuuki tries to organize and delegate assignments for the story and to coordinate with the other departments to get the story ready for print as soon as it is possible. We get a first-hand glimpse of the politics involved with various departments as well as the different factions supporting politicians on opposing parties. 

The story is more about how the news is handled and presented than it is about the crash itself. It isn’t only about the characters, but the ethics of what’s appropriate or not. Are the deaths of people in a major disaster more important to the media than the death of an individual that has little to no value to a newspaper? 

“There are big lives and little lives, aren’t there? Heavy lives and lightweight lives, and lives that are...not.” 

It’s definitely something to think about. ~Ernie Hoyt