Hideo Yokoyama's Seventeen is an investigative thriller that focuses on the real-life tragedy of Japan Airlines Flight 123, a 1985 crash that left 520 dead. This follow-up to his novel Six Four draws 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. His novel follows fictional protagonist Kazumasa Yuuki, an experienced reporter at the North Kanto Times in Gunma. Yuuki's career has been stalled for years after a tragic incident with a coworker, but he finds his status elevated once he's assigned to be desk chief for the JAL crash.The novel alternates between the frenzy of the 1985 newsroom and 2003, when Yuuki attempts to fulfill a promise made in those hectic days by climbing 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. These sections of the novel frequently reference the phenomenon known as "climber's high," when "the body gets overstimulated, reaches a level of extreme excitement. The fear makes them numb.... They climb in a mad frenzy and, before they know it, they're at the peak." This high--which promotes recklessness and is usually followed by a crash--serves as a link between the climbing sections and the events of 17 years prior, when Yuuki was forced to make a number of high-pressure decisions in a short amount of time.
After the jet crashes, Yuuki moves quickly to coordinate his paper's coverage. Reporters sent to climb 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.
Although Seventeen takes place in a distinct era of journalism, many of its concerns feel eternally relevant. The novel is full of difficult, even violent arguments. One of the reporters presses Yuuki, saying: "What I described--that's the true accident scene. The corpses, the entrails, shouldn't we write about everything?... If we don't paint a true picture of the full f**king misery, then what's the point?" Yuuki responds by saying: "Just remember this.... Those five hundred and twenty people didn't lose their lives for you to get off on it." Seventeen is a thoughtful take on the purposes good journalism 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.
Shelf Talker: Seventeen is a thriller that alternates between a reporter covering a Japanese plane disaster in 1985 and the same reporter's 2003 attempt to climb a famously dangerous mountain.