Adam Hetherington is a reader and a BTBA judge.

by Hideo Yokoyama, translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai (Japan, FSG)

In August of 1985, Japan Airlines (JAL) Flight 123 crashed into Mt. Osutaka in the Gunma Prefecture, killing 520 people. Hideo Yokoyama’s recounts this tragedy from a unique perspective, as the author was employed at the local newspaper—the North Kanto Times (or NKT)—at that time. From the preface:

At the time, I was working as an investigative/police beat reporter at a local Gunma newspaper. 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.

Yokoyama, an investigative reporter and an amateur climber, was dispatched up the mountain to the crash site, while his character Kazumasa Yuuki manages the coverage from the office. It’s impossible to know which aspects of the novel are lifted verbatim from Yokoyama’s experience and which are fiction, but the distance of the character Yuuki’s position from Yokoyama’s own leaves room for a further type of reportage: a device to cleanly separate an individual character from the intertwining of the known personal and larger, newsworthy histories.

This type of disentanglement of the individual pieces of a book played a part in , Hideo Yokoyama’s only other novel available in English (translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies), too. It used the lure of an unsolved crime to examine the structure of Japan’s police. It was sold as a crime thriller, and while it did technically contain all the spinning gears generally associated with thrillers, it was not particularly thrilling. The book moved slowly, accumulating a mass of detail through something like the interrogation of the procedural genre itself. You could maybe call it meta-procedural, or a deconstructed thriller, though both of these terms seem to imply a level of formal experimentation that isn’t really present. Its differentiation from most other crime novels is Yokoyama’s un-exploitative realism. Thrillers often work through exaggeration—characters are reducible to one thing: genius, evil, dumb, funny, crass, sexy, etc; coincidences are numerous and fortuitous; the lives inside the plot are all moving toward something recognizable and tidy, not so different from episodic crime TV shows. Yokoyama’s fiction works though the incremental recreation of life. Indirect, branching, stalling, lovely life. Rather than a cat-and-mouse game of clues, we get a character map of action and empathy over time, revealed through the repeated sounding-out of the overlapping bureaucratic silences that make up the structure of the police itself. Six Four is a moving, beautiful novel, largely consisting of things almost happening.

In his book Sculpting in Time (translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair), Andrei Tarkovsky wrote “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death.” Yokoyama’s Seventeen, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, somewhat reverses this. The events surrounding the investigation into the crash that caused 520 deaths prepare Yuuki for the beauty available in his own life. He is a flawed, frustrating protagonist: quick to anger, fairly self-aware without any drive for self-improvement, and introspective without ever applying any of what he discovers about himself to daily existence. When we meet him, he’s simply aware of the conditions of his life, and of the conditions his sometimes horrible actions cause in the lives of others. He is sinking into his own existence, avoiding change or growth. But later, Yuuki—outwardly stoic in complacency, inwardly clear-eyed about his shortcomings—finds a type of personal success in the newspaper’s investigation in an unexpected way. Despite himself, he is able to withstand the absolute crush of capitalism on the news. Yuuki stands up to everyone. He demands integrity from a bureaucracy, and somehow he gets it, though at great personal cost. Through the competing pressures of a life realized through an investigation, Yokoyama again shows us the organizational structure of a job, and of its place in Japanese society. This is his brilliance, I think; his ability to describe one knot while untangling another. I actually didn’t plan on writing about what the book is so much as what it does, and I think in doing so, I’ve undersold something: how emotional it is, and how bare it left me. It’s a very careful book, almost understated, and it’s about a circumspect person, but it’s not at all cold. Yuuki transcends what he thought he could do professionally, which is who he thought he was personally, which then in turn slightly changes who he is as a person. I don’t want to overstate Yuuki’s redemption or transformation, but some things do change for him, and through this, that un-exploitave realism I mentioned earlier becomes emotionally animate. With the steady, measured prose of Yokoyama and Heal Kawai serving as scaffolding, Yuuki’s growth and personal interactions begin to resonate like the advent of technicolor; the landscape of his purposefully flat life begins to pile and erode. I don’t want to give any specifics here (apologies for pitching you half a plot in this post; I don’t really care about giving spoilers generally, but I do worry that in this case the bell might ring a little less true if you expect to hear it), but the book has a kind of plain honesty that put me in mind of John Williams’s Stoner, though that’s all they have in common. The judges for this award have had a group text going since last summer, and while I’m not going to tip any hands except my own, I will tell you I’m not the only person who admitted to crying more than once while reading this book. Seventeen is a marvel.

This is a great novel about a newspaper, and it was released in English in 2018. This alone gives it weight. When I sat down to write this, I was actually planning on writing this whole post about how Seventeen is an indictment of our 24 hour news cycle. This was not Yokoyama’s intent (Death of the Author and all that) at all, though the repudiation is total. His constant interrogation of fact, of the motive for gathering that fact, and of both the cost of and motive for sharing that fact feels like the polar opposite of what we have today. In Seventeen there’s still a struggle against the influence of profit on news, a ghost we’ve almost given up here in the United States. We’ve all lost friends and family to things like Fox, to news that exists as a profitable business model, first and foremost, selling the pyramid scheme of itself to people who should have known better. To being sold the idea that a person is right to live in fear, and because they’re absolutely right to be scared, their hatred of what they fear is both moral and intellectual; to right-wing journalists who are making a goddamn mint reinforcing this, telling people that what they’re already doing (being noisy about their willful ignorance) is right, and that unlike everyone else in history, they don’t need any introspection or change, or to apologize for anything, ever—they just need to keep tuning in; and to an entire religion that has been warped beyond belief, to allow its adherents to believe that because they are Christian, all the things they say and do are Good, and so it’s actually perfectly fine when they made the least Christlike man I’ve ever heard of president, still no cause for introspection or alarm; and to the cult of defending the president, a uniquely stupid, cruel man, who was born rich and doesn’t believe in anything, and who has never really worked: he’s never dug a hole, never cleaned a toilet, never counted down a till, never sold a book, never read an entire book, never loaded a dishwasher, never swung a hammer, never swept or mopped, never needed a paycheck on Friday. This kind of stuff is not in the book, but you can imagine how a novel about a newspaper doing the right thing could drag this out of a person. I’ll stop.

Finally, Seventeen is a book about the effect of the application of integrity—a thing available to all— to a life, and that gives me hope, which is as good a reason as any for a book to win.

ł§±đ±ą±đ˛ÔłŮ±đ±đ˛ÔĚýby Hideo Yokoyama
Translated from Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai
368 pgs. | hc | 9780374261245 | $28.00

Review by Maggie Myers

Seventeen is a thrilling mixture of truth and fiction by Hideo Yokoyama, acclaimed author of Six Four (which has also been translated into English). Seventeen realistically portrays the turmoil engendered on both a personal and a professional level by the very real 1985 crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123, which is still the deadliest single-aircraft disaster in history. The book opens in 2003 with Kazumasa Yuuki embarking on a climb up the Tsuitate rock face of Mount Tanigawa—often referred to as the “Mountain of Death.” As he makes the ascent, he recalls the day of the crash seventeen years ago and the week following as he worked as a reporter for the North Kanto Times, responsible for covering the tragedy. Through flashbacks, he vividly describes the events of each day and the emotions triggered within him, especially as they related to decisions about what to print about the crash.

Yuuki’s insights offer an unusual perspective on tragedy, as grief for the lives lost contends with the excitement of such a momentous scoop. Beyond his internal ethics, the broader impact of the event on the newsroom reveals the convoluted, and somewhat corrupt, power machinations within the NKT. Added to the balance are young reporters who are filled with their own self-importance, unwilling to accept that they might be wrong. Hanazawa, one of the first reporters to climb to the scene of the crash, is furious with Yuuki for passing over his article in favor of one from another reporter:

“Wajima’s account is fake. What I described—that’s the true accident scene. The corpses, the entrails, shouldn’t we write about everything? Isn’t it a newspaper’s mission to make sure this never happens again? If we don’t paint a true picture of the full fucking misery, then what’s the point? If you say you won’t publish my article, I’ll take it somewhere else. I can’t do this anymore. It was horrendous. There were corpses everywhere. Literally as far as the eye could see. There was not one decent, normal thing about it. Scattered all over—”

His voice was cut off by Yuuki’s hands around his throat. Yuuki pushed until Hanazawa’s head touched the wall behind him. Even then the man was still trying to speak.

“Just remember this,” Yuuki said through clenched teeth. “Those five hundred and twenty people didn’t lose their lives for you to get off on it.”

Yokoyama himself was a reporter who covered the JAL123 crash, which lends an undeniable authenticity to his writing. He uses Yuuki’s fictitious perspective to remove himself from his memories and reexamine everything that happened. Unlike Yuuki, Yokoyama climbed to the crash site immediately after the disaster and, because the trek was so long and arduous, he had to “spend the night on the mountain, surrounded by body parts that no longer resembled anything human.” Yokoyama wrote this novel in part to “escape” his memories of the crash, seventeen years afterward—like Yuuki, who is reliving his experience seventeen years later.

Kawai’s translation brought the emotions and concepts behind Yokoyama’s words into English without any residual awkwardness. Even without familiarity with Japanese culture, readers can pick up on certain cultural details, like the respect for age and social status, which is made apparent in the translation as well. At one point, Yuuki receives a reliable tip about the cause of the crash, but decides not to print it before receiving confirmation, which leads to another paper beating the NKT to the scoop. Despite derision from most of the office, a fellow (but younger) reporter calls Yuuki to tell him he made the right decision and refers to him as “Yuu-san” instead of the normal “Yuuki-san.” The difference seems slight until Yuuki, thinking back to the phone call, draws attention to it regrets not thanking him for using the appellation, making clear the close bond of respect and friendship implied by the nickname.

Yuuki’s recollections of that week in 1985 are interwoven with chapters detailing his progress up Tsuitate, providing a break from the fast-paced action in the newsroom. As he climbs up with Rintaro Anzai, the son of his colleague Kyoichiro Anzai, information about present circumstances invites many questions about the past—why did Kyoichiro collapse and go into a coma on the same night as the crash? In what capacity is Yuuki now working for the NKT, and why did it change? How did he end up acting as Rintaro’s second father? The evolving mysteries set the book within a broader framework, beyond just the week of the disaster. Tidbits of information provide a welcome distraction from news of the flight.

The author’s candor in describing Yuuki’s reasoning makes him quite relatable. Some of his choices are incredibly frustrating because he considers better options but is too cowardly to see them through. Power machinations within the NKT clearly have a huge impact on what gets printed, and from his position Yuuki can see everyone’s political alignments. Trying not to pick a side, as we all know, only gets him so far. His moral compass seems to be relatively well aligned, but he often lacks the nerve and willpower to fight for what he believes to be right. Eventually he gains both confidence and courage and begins to make more controversial decisions—risking the wrath of his superiors and forcing him to decide between his integrity and his job.