A Review of Hideo Yokoyama’s “Seventeen”
Coverage of a Crash
The year 1985 was a particularly devastating year for plane crashes. It was the year that we lost peace girl Samantha Smith to an aviation accident, and it seemed that a crash was in the news every other week. That same year, a Japan Airlines flight crashed into a mountainside in Gunma Prefecture, killing 520 people and leaving only four survivors. It was the worst single airplane crash in history. At the time, Hideo Yokoyama was working as a reporter for a newspaper covering the crash. He would go on to write a fictitious novel about it, his second novel to now be translated into English (this time by Louise Heal Kawai). Titled Seventeen for English audiences, the novel flips between protagonist Kazumasa Yuuki’s coverage of the crash in 1985 and an attempt to climb a mountain with the son of a former colleague seventeen years later in 2003, thereby bringing some reconciliation as Yuuki and the colleague were going to climb the same mountain until fate set in.
For all of the hoopla of Seventeen being billed as a “thriller” by the publisher, this novel spends the bulk of its time in the newsroom. The thrills come from Yuuki having to navigate office politics and use reporters like pawns in order to get a big scoop. This might not be so thrilling to some, but, as a former journalist myself, I was mostly drawn into the story. If anything, Seventeen is a reminder as to why I no longer participate in the craft, unless you consider these reviews to be a form of journalism. Reporters in this novel are judged by how big of a story they land, and, of course, reporters who work the arts beat (as I once did) are labelled as soft. I guess that’s why I wound up being a freelancer and no paper wanted to hire me. I was too sensitive to working my way through the police beat and seeing dead bodies and grieving relatives.
In any event, Seventeen is a gripping read. It is not without its challenges and problems. For one thing, it would help if you bone up on Japanese political history of the 1970s and ’80s before reading this book, because support for one of two particular Japanese Prime Ministers of the era come into play between various factions of the newsroom. Yokoyama doesn’t offer up much in the way of a historical backstory that would help American readers of the book, probably because this novel is translated from the Japanese, and Yokoyama was really writing for a local crowd. The other striking thing is that, aside from Yuuki and a character or two, most of the people who populate the newsroom are anonymous. To that end, there’s a long list of characters at the front of the book with their roles in the plot listed. You may need to consult it frequently, because minor characters come and go and aren’t given much in the way of a personal history. They’re just there.
However, the novel does have its strengths. For one thing, as much as this a book about the inner-workings of a newspaper, it is a story about a 40-year-old man whose choice of vocation causes strain on his family life. Yuuki’s relationship with his wife is cordial at best, but he feels alienated and estranged from his teenage son. This is a novel about father-son types of relationships and how working in the news biz can tilt the scales of power dynamics in families and among co-workers. In that area, Seventeen is startling and acutely accurate. I found that I, myself, was emotionally immature in my workings as a reporter, having it been hammered into me to always ask the tough questions and get a scoop that nobody else can get — as if those were the only things that mattered in the world, to the expense of healthy relationships with people.
Seventeen might give readers pause in thinking about how low the journalism world has gone since the time of its setting. Again, the story is set in 1985, a time when the 24–7 cycle of news from cable news networks was only just coming into shape and the rush to print or broadcast news that might be dubious just to fill space and get ahead of the competition had come into being. (And, of course, there was no Internet back then.) In this novel, Yuuki agonizes over running a scoop that has yet to be properly verified by authorities. Such agony probably doesn’t happen much in newsrooms today — there’s more of a “get it out there” mentality along with the mentality of “if it’s wrong, we can always retract the story.” (Or not, depending on whether you work for FOX News.) Seventeen is a look at journalism ethics, or at least the ethics of a different time period. I would say that this book should be required reading for every young reporter, except that the ethics presented in this book come from a different time and place and feel quite antiquated today.
Still, if you can appreciate the fact that Seventeen is all about the newsroom and not about the crash site, you might find the novel to be engrossing. There are a few lulls and there’s a fair bit of bloat in the mid-section of the book as the shock of the crash begins to wear off and journalists and editors consider turning their efforts elsewhere. Still, for a week in the life of the aftermath of a major disaster, Seventeen gets the details right — how reporters operate on next to no sleep, the sacrifices that have to be made in the fact of publishing deadlines, how office politics works its way into nearly every story decision that is made. Yokoyama knows his stuff and writes not only from experience, but from the heart. For that reason, Seventeen is recommended reading for those interested in how things used to be done in journalism and how things are done in Japanese literature as a whole. This is good stuff.
Hideo Yokoyama’s Seventeen was published in trade paperback by Picador on November 26, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
