Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama (Six Four) is an investigative thriller that focuses on the real-life tragedy of Japan Airlines Flight 123, a 1985 crash that left 520 dead, while drawing heavily on the author's experience as a reporter at a local newspaper in Gunma Prefecture after the passenger plane crashed into a nearby mountain range. The novel follows fictional protagonist Kazumasa Yuuki, an experienced reporter at the North Kanto Times in Gunma, as it alternates between the frenzy of the 1985 newsroom and 2003, when Yuuki attempts to climb the famously dangerous Tsuitate rock face on Mount Tanigawa. Nicknamed "Devil's Mountain," Tanigawa claimed 779 lives prior to Yuuki's attempt, and he is understandably nervous.
After the jet crashes, Yuuki moves quickly to coordinate his paper's coverage. Reporters sent to the mountain return shaken by the gruesome site strewn with body parts. Office politics become a major stumbling block in tackling the enormous tragedy, as Yuuki struggles with powerful personalities and factional divides that threaten to paralyze the newsroom. Perhaps Yuuki's greatest challenge in covering the disaster, however, is his strong sense of journalistic ethics, which often puts him at odds with employees of the newspaper operating under the sometimes perverse incentives of for-profit journalism.
Seventeen's most gripping moments come with Yuuki on the verge of enormous scoops, struggling to authenticate information while the deadline comes nail-bitingly close. It is a thoughtful take on the purposes good reportage should serve, as well as a meditation on how brief moments in time can shape the rest of our lives. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, N.C.