Seventeen: A Novel

In 1985 one of the worst, if not the worst, airline crashes happened in Japan when over five hundred people were killed when a Japan Airlines flight crashed into a mountain. Kazumasa Yuuki is a seasoned reporter who is considered a lone wolf and generally a person thought to be on the way out after the death of a colleague who worked under him. When he is about to leave, he gets word of the crash, and after that, he is put in charge of the news team a bid to sink or swim. This book recounts that fateful week, plus the promise he made to a friend that he fulfills seventeen years later and something that could lay to rest one of the last mysteries of that time. For people who have read the author’s previous work translated into English, it is very similar in style. Extremely detailed and very fast paced. It shows what a newsroom at a semi-major newspaper in Japan was like in the 1980s. The office politics, people defending their turf, and trying to outrace other papers for scoops. The book goes by quickly, just as the events did in 1985.