Hideo Yokoyama's Seventeen centres on the JAL 123 airline disaster in 1985. Yuuki is an unambitious local news reporter who is unwillingly tapped to head his newspaper's coverage of the disaster. This event forces him to cancel a planned climbing trip, with unexpected consequences. Seventeen years later Yuuki is once again set upon performing this climb, this time as a middle-aged man.

Yuuki's attempts to do this gigantic story justice meet resistance from all quarters, and he ends up in a series of escalating confrontations as he tries to do the right thing in terms of both the gravity of the event and the impact on bereaved families and survivors. His chosen methods get a lot of his more conservative management and colleagues offside, and he begins to question his own motives and effectiveness.

While he is caught up in this drama, Yuuki also has to deal with family troubles and a crisis with one of his friends.

As with Six Four, Yokoyama excels at capturing the internecine office politics in Japanese companies. In his preceding book, the political games were being played out with a police media liaison officer and crime reporters; this time his setting is within a regional newspaper office. Yokoyama is a former journalist himself, which lends his story significant verisimilitude. This is a very different and affecting novel. ( )

Yuuki was appointed the desk lead for the JAL crash. He made mistakes, wrong judgments, rubbed people the wrong way but stood up for what he thinks is right and fought for it. In the process, he earned the respect of his colleagues, including those he had been at loggerheads with for years. Because of one decision, he had to be relegated to a one-man desk in a small village but he continues to write and to report. The secondary storyline is about the relationship between Yuuki and his son. Yuuki had always yearned for a tight relationship with his son, he tried and he thought he didn't succeed until Rintaro told him otherwise. Unbeknown to him, his son was very happy when Yuuki invited him to go for hikes together, and he had also treasured the regular hikes with him. I am sure we all feel happy for Yuuki. ( )

It's called a thriller but it isn't. It's a newsroom narrative and there is little actual suspense. I enjoyed learning more about modern Japanese culture, in particular a 1980s newsroom and the way this man approached emotions and hierarchies, but it was pretty plodding and overwritten. ( )

It’s 12 August 1985. Journalist Kazumasa Yuuki is trying to wrap up his work at the North Kanto Times so he can head off for a weekend climbing with his colleague Kyoichiro Anzai. They plan to tackle the demanding Tsuitate rock face on Mount Tanigawa, something far more challenging than anything Yuuki’s attempted before. However, just as he’s about to leave the office, he and his colleagues hear a shocking news report. A Japan Airlines jumbo jet carrying 524 people has disappeared from the radar; soon, news comes that it has crashed into a ridge near Mount Osutaka, with almost complete loss of life. The staff of the paper are stunned into silence. This is on their patch. Suddenly their small provincial paper is on the front line for the deadliest airline crash in history. Hideo Yokoyama’s novel covers the seven days that follow, as the editorial staff struggle to overcome internal factions to deal with the crash. Based on the true story of the Japan Airlines Flight 123, and inspired by Yokoyama’s own experiences working as a reporter for a regional newspaper in Gunma Prefecture at the time, this is a sobering and thoughtful story about rising to meet challenges – both in and out of the office...

For the full review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2020/04/16/seventeen-hideo-yokoyama/ ( )

I bought this book because it had an arresting cover image. It took me by surprise - an absorbing,fascinating story, ostensibly about the pressures of life in a newspaper office when a once-in-a-lifetimecatastrpohe occurs, but with deep emotional undercurrents. I climb up to step down ..... ( )