BOOKS: THE DEAD LINE
Crime novelist Hideo Yokoyama’s Seventeen is billed as a thriller. But it’s really a newsroom drama, and as such nothing like Six Four—the first of the bestselling author’s novels to be translated into English.
Set in the offices of the fictitious North Kanto Times in 1985, it centres on the trials of the journalists covering the crash of a Japan Air Lines (JAL) jumbo jet that killed 520 passengers—a real story that Yokoyama covered when he worked at the Jomo Shimbun newspaper in Gunma Prefecture.
On August 12, 1985, newspaper offices across Japan went into a frenzy changing layouts for the next day’s paper as stories of a crashed JAL flight trickled in. At the fictional North Kanto Times, desk editor Kazumasa Yuuki finds himself the reluctant supervisor of the crash coverage, attempting to manage flaring egos, personal rivalries and political intrigues. The tantrums, conspiracies and hushed-up sexual harassment Yokoyama depicts are common to newsrooms in India and no doubt around the world. What is uniquely Japanese is how the modalities of hierarchy and deference play out. Yuuki is constantly plagued by questions of ‘big lives’ and ‘small lives’. He loses a scoop to a rival newspaper and then his position at the headquarters when he decides to publish a controversial letter to the victims’ families. Eventually, it is the ethics of journalism that drive the plot.
While Six Four incorporated elements of the thriller to depict the inner world of police bureaucracy, there is no “crime” as such in Seventeen. The only mystery is the fate of Yuuki’s friend, Anzai, who falls into a vegetative state after sheer exhaustion from overwork—a casualty of Japan’s now well-documented problem with exhausting work cultures. (Last year, police concluded that a 31-year-old reporter had literally worked herself to death, logging 159 hours of overtime.)
Like Six Four, though, the deep dive into the murk is well worth it if you crack open Seventeen with the right expectations.