Seventeen

by Hideo Yokoyama

  But their plans had been thwarted. The night before they were due to set out, a Japan Airlines jumbo jet had crashed into the mountains near Uenomura, Gunma Prefecture. In an instant, 520 lives were lost. Yuuki had been put in charge of coverage of the crash at the local North Kanto Times, so, as it turned out, he’d done battle with a completely different “Gravestone Mountain.”

  And Anzai— Sensing activity ahead, Yuuki looked up to see that he had almost reached the Doaiguchi ropeway terminal. The square in front of the station and the nearby parking lot were bustling with day-trippers. Ignoring the souvenir stalls, he continued along the old road until he spotted the Climbing Information Center. He glanced at his watch. It wasn’t quite three o’clock. He had a little time to wait, so he sat down on one of the benches inside. He was approached by a cheerful-looking man wearing an armband that identified him as a guide.

  “Hello there. Which route are you planning to take?”

  “We’re going to set up camp at Ichinokurasawa, then climb the Tsuitate face tomorrow.”

  As he spoke, Yuuki unzipped his waist pouch and produced his climbing permit. He’d submitted his application by mail about ten days previously, and it had been returned to him approved and stamped.

  “Tsuitate, huh?” the guide muttered, looking down at the permit. The first thing he must have spotted was Yuuki’s age. Then the section giving details of his experience raised an eyebrow. In preparation for this ascent, Yuuki had been rock climbing many times at the Haruna and Myogi ski resorts, but he had no serious climbing experience under his belt. The guide was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain his cheerful expression, but just as he was about to say something, a tall young man walked through the door and greeted Yuuki with a bow.

  “I’m sorry I’m late.”

  “What, you’re young Anzai’s climbing buddy?” said the guide, his tone softening. Any trace of his earlier anxiety vanished, and he stood up and left.

  “Thanks.”

  Yuuki gave a wry smile, and the young ace of the local mountaineering club flashed him a grin in return.

  When Rintaro Anzai smiled, he was the embodiment of youth. It was hard to believe he had already turned thirty. He’d inherited his father’s large, twinkling eyes, but his shyness and modesty had come from his mother. Anzai senior had once confided in Yuuki that his son was supposed to have been named Rentaro, not Rintaro. If you’d put his family name and the first part of his given name together (Anzai Ren) it would have sounded like the German anseilen, which, in the climbing world, means tying on the rope.

  “But the wife saw through that one right away,” he’d said wistfully.

  “Yuuki-san, any news of Jun?” Rintaro asked.

  “I haven’t managed to get in touch with him.”

  Yuuki couldn’t look Rintaro in the eyes. His son, Jun, had an apartment in Tokyo. Yuuki had left a message on his voice mail to let him know about today’s plan, but Jun hadn’t called back.

  “So it’ll be just the two of us. That was the plan in the first place, anyway.”

  “All right. So how shall we do this? We could stay the night here, if you like?”

  “No, I’d prefer to get up to where the rivers meet at Ichinokurasawa and pitch the tents. It’s been so long. I’m looking forward to seeing it again.”

  Rintaro nodded, clearly pleased by Yuuki’s enthusiastic response, and started to check the equipment.

  Yuuki watched him in admiration. He’d known Rintaro since he was thirteen years old. The boy had grown up into a sturdy young man, both physically and mentally. Most important, he’d been raised to be kind and honest.

  Two months ago, Rintaro had been standing alone in the parking lot of a funeral hall in Maebashi. He was silently watching the trail of smoke rising from the square chimney of the crematorium. His eyes were wet but he didn’t let himself cry. Yuuki had come up and patted him on the shoulder.

  “Looks like Dad headed north after all,” Rintaro had mumbled, still looking up at the sky.

  “Ready.”

  “Great. Let’s go.”

  They left the information center and set out along the shaded, zigzagging trail. The slope was still gentle. The tall beech woods that lined the route made the air seem dense. There was a noise in the undergrowth, and a wild monkey warily crossed the trail ahead of them.

  Rintaro walked ahead in silence and Yuuki simply followed. After a while, they arrived at the Ichinokurasawa intersection. Immediately Yuuki realized that his memory had failed him. Back then the rock face had taken him by surprise, appearing out of nowhere. All that had stuck in his mind was the impact of that moment.

  He was caught off guard again today. Rintaro, walking in the middle of the track, suddenly moved over to the right, opening up the view for Yuuki. He caught his breath and stopped dead.

  A fortress of rock towered darkly before him. It was still quite far off, but overwhelming, looming over everything else in his field of vision. The ridge cut a straight line through the air, leaving nothing but a narrow sliver of sky above. It wasn’t what he’d call a magnificent view; it was too oppressive for that. Ichinokurasawa wouldn’t let mere mortals in. Yuuki was struck by the thought that Nature had constructed this rampart for that very purpose.

  Tsuitate. It stood there, the main gate protecting these giant castle walls. A painfully sharp vertical rock face like a hanging screen or a wall. It looked as if it had been folded vertically over and over, producing a series of overhangs, or “roofs.” The rock itself had a brutal countenance, worthy of its nickname the Worst of the Worst.

  Yuuki gave voice to his misgivings. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

  Rintaro’s response was brief. “Sure you can.”

  The younger man set off down toward the dry riverbed, presumably searching for a good location to pitch their tents. But Yuuki couldn’t move. His body was seized by the fear he’d felt almost two decades before.

  And that time they’d only been checking out the climbing route. This time they were actually doing it.

  The two Gravestone Mountains merged in his mind. He felt the same excitement as seventeen years ago rush through him.

  It had been a plane crash of unprecedented proportions. An out-of-control Japan Airlines plane, Flight 123, had strayed into Gunma Prefecture. Yuuki had also changed course that day. He’d been drifting along, leading a life that was not healthy for him, not making any effort to improve it. But the monotony of his daily routine had been turned completely upside down by that accident. Those seven days on the newsroom floor, dealing with something huge. Every agonizing minute that ticked by had brought a new self-awareness and, consequently, his life had veered off on another course.

  Yuuki looked up at the Tsuitate face defiantly.

  Elevation: 330 meters—I’m going to haul myself up a vertical cliff face the height of Tokyo Tower.

  “I climb up to step down.”

  He could see the look in Anzai’s eyes. Months before, even with his body covered in tubes, held captive in a bed, his eyes had twinkled.

  He’d climbed this, Kyoichiro Anzai. Suddenly Yuuki’s vision blurred. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and slowly exhaled. He listened once again to Anzai’s voice in his head. Yuuki had to climb the mountain. He needed to know what these last seventeen years had been about.

  August 12, 1985. That was the day it had all started.

  2

  Even early in the morning, the heat was oppressive.

  Yuuki had spent the start of his working day at the home of an ex-soldier in the outskirts of Takasaki City. He was gathering material for a ten-part series the paper was running: “Forty Years after the War: Stories from Gunma.” It had been published daily since August 6, and the final installment was due to appear on the fifteenth, the anniversary of the end of the Second World War. However, Aoki, the political correspondent assigned to write the final article, had suddenly been called away to the Tokyo office, and the job of collecting the material for th
e story had fallen to Yuuki.

  In the provinces, the rush to get out of the city to visit family homes for the Obon holidays was supposedly under way, but in Nagatacho, where the central government buildings were located, it was business as usual. Japan’s prime minister, Yasuhiro Nakasone, had decided to pay an official visit to Yasukuni Shrine, which honored Japan’s war dead. Such visits had become controversial, ever since 1979, when it had come to light that Yasukuni Shrine held the ashes of fourteen Class A Second World War criminals. It looked as if the format of the visit was going to be decided today, the twelfth. Calling from Tokyo the previous night, Aoki had sounded excited about being in the capital, competing with journalists from the whole of Japan. He’d forgotten to thank the senior reporter for covering for him.

  Yuuki drove toward Maebashi City. It was the monthly commemoration of the death of Ryota Mochizuki, who had been a junior reporter at the newspaper, and after paying his respects at Mochizuki’s grave, he headed back to work. It was lunchtime when he arrived, but he didn’t feel hungry. He decided to forgo the basement cafeteria and go directly to the main office of the second-floor Editorial Department, the newsroom. The North Kanto Times didn’t produce an evening edition, so there were few people there this time of day. Fortunately, it seemed that the air conditioner had been on full blast since the morning. The heat outside now was beyond description. In the short time it had taken him to hurry from the parking lot on the other side of the street into the office, his shirt was soaked with sweat and sticking to his back.

  “Hello. NKT here.”

  The first thing he heard was the cheerful tone of Yoshii in the copy team, from the farthest desk. The call was from a reporter covering this year’s Koshien—the national senior high school baseball tournament—and they seemed to be having a lively chat about it. Yuuki had always worked on local news and didn’t know much about sports, but it sounded as if the team representing Gunma Prefecture, Nodai Niko High, was doing well. They’d won the first-round game in the bottom of the ninth with a walk-off home run, and the paper had just dispatched an extra reporter and photographer to cover their second-round match.

  Turning his face full-on to the chilled breeze of the air conditioner, Yuuki reflected on what had just happened at the cemetery. As he was leaving, he had run into Mochizuki’s parents, carrying flowers, which of course was unsurprising. They had bowed politely to one another and continued in their separate directions, but the young woman accompanying them had turned up her nose and glared defiantly at Yuuki. She looked to be in her late teens, and Yuuki had the vague feeling he had seen her before. If it was the girl in the school uniform he’d seen at the funeral five years earlier, it would be Mochizuki’s cousin. He wasn’t sure if her own memories of the events had caused her to react to him that way, or if perhaps the parents, who had lost their only son, had expressed their resentment of Yuuki to other members of the family. Yuuki had wondered about this the whole drive back.

  “Morning.”

  It was the laid-back voice of Kamejima, the chief copy editor, coming over to take advantage of the cool breeze, too. His round moon face was sweating heavily. Everyone called him Kaku-san, but not because of his resemblance to the anime character of the same name, or because his name began with the sound “ka.” It was a play on the word for “write”: in kanji, the characters of his name had the most strokes, and therefore took the longest to write, of anyone’s in the office. It went without saying that the creator of this nickname was a member of the proofreading team.

  “It’s fucking sweltering!” Kamejima pulled his shirt collar away from his neck and leaned forward to let in the cool air from the unit. The toothpick he was chewing told Yuuki that he hadn’t just arrived at the office. He’d been in early and had just returned from the cafeteria.

  “Kaku-san, anything happen today?”

  “Yeah. Early this morning there was a development in the Glico Morinaga case.”

  Yuuki had asked only as part of a perfunctory greeting, so this was a complete surprise.

  Kamejima talked for a while about the story, which had come to them through the Kyodo News Service. In the midst of the summer slow season, this was A-grade material. The article that would appear in tomorrow morning’s national news would have been put together in a hurry and already passed to the copy team, so Kamejima knew what he was talking about.

  Having cooled off sufficiently, Yuuki took a pad of writing paper over to the desk by the window and sat down. The desk didn’t really belong to him, but he’d been monopolizing it for years. The desk phone had an outside line, so it was useful for gathering information. He had membership in the press clubs attached to both the prefectural government office and the prefectural police headquarters, but he rarely went to them. The newspaper had its assigned representatives at each of these pressrooms and, if Yuuki turned up, as a senior reporter, he would just be in the way.

  He’d turned forty last month and was the longest-serving reporter at the paper. “Roving reporter,” “relief reporter”—there were many names for what he did—but, put simply, he had no people working under him and he was given a free hand to report on whatever he wanted. There were plenty who envied him, and many who pitied him. His contemporaries—the reporters who had joined the company at the same time—had long since been assigned to positions at specific news desks. And recently, junior staff members had started to be promoted to branch offices in major cities like Takasaki or Ota. There were rumors that Yuuki had been subjected to a five-year disciplinary action, gossip that had reached even Yuuki’s ears.

  Had it really been five years? Ryota Mochizuki had been a junior staff member in his first year as a reporter, and assigned to Yuuki. It had been back when Yuuki had been the North Kanto Times’s lead police beat reporter, attached to the prefectural police headquarters. Mochizuki had been promising, but he had passed away before he got the chance to prove himself.

  It had been only the sixth day of his assignment to Yuuki. There had been a fatal traffic accident in Ogomachi, the neighboring town to Maebashi City. A thirty-eight-year-old surveyor riding a motorbike had been hit by a car and died of a cerebral contusion. Yuuki had sent Mochizuki to get a photo of the deceased. It was usual practice to send the rookie reporter to hunt down a photo of the victim in a criminal case or an accident. Mochizuki had cheerfully accepted the task and set out. However, less than an hour later he was back in the pressroom, utterly dejected. He’d found the surveyor’s home, but an official of the local residents’ association who was helping the family prepare for the deceased’s wake had chased him away, asking him what the hell he was playing at, “showing up and demanding a photo at a time like this.”

  Yuuki ordered him to go back again. This time he was to try to talk to a relative or ex-classmate of the deceased. But Mochizuki didn’t budge. When Yuuki got angry and raised his voice he became defiant. Why was it so important to print a photo of the victim in the newspaper? Yuuki was taken aback. It was true that, every year, reporters seemed to be getting more and more gutless, but it was the first time he had had a confrontation with one who was like that from the get-go. His response was brutal. “You fucking idiot. That’s our business. The product is better when it has a photo.” He had used a whole load of other choice expressions, too. He’d been furious.

  Mochizuki had bitten his lip and fled from the pressroom. And that was the last time Yuuki had ever seen him. An hour later, he had a car accident. On the Route 17 bypass in Takasaki City he had run a red light, crashed into a ten-ton truck, and died instantly. In a terrible irony, the following morning’s edition carried no head shot of the surveyor but featured the serious-looking face of Mochizuki, taken from his employee ID card.

  Mochizuki’s parents didn’t make any fuss. They didn’t look up when Yuuki explained the circumstances of their son’s death; they never spoke a single bitter word; they simply stood side by side, staring at the floor.

  The reaction within the company was mostly sympathe
tic toward Yuuki. The argument with Mochizuki had been overheard by the North Kanto Times’s number two at the police headquarters, a reporter by the name of Sayama, and the details had spread around the company. It was generally agreed that “anyone would have been angry under the circumstances.” Yuuki had hated having to listen to this and similar phrases, and being patted on the shoulder each time. Still, Sayama had defended Yuuki one hundred percent. He had given up his day off to look into the surveyor’s personal circumstances. He had discovered that the man had no relatives or ex-classmates in the Takasaki City area and so, rather than being in the process of hunting down the victim’s photo when he had had the traffic accident, Mochizuki had been heading toward his own parents’ house. Sayama used the rather harsh expression “desertion in the line of duty” in his report. With that, the last smoldering embers of sympathy for Mochizuki at the company were extinguished.

  Sayama’s father had committed suicide and his mother had died in a traffic accident, and this had caused him much suffering over the years. These experiences had led him to go all out to defend Yuuki.

  No further action to be taken. That was the company’s decision regarding Yuuki’s conduct. However, this didn’t mean that Yuuki’s conscience was clear. On the contrary, the heavy, leaden feeling in his heart only got heavier. Mochizuki had been an inexperienced first-year reporter. In retrospect, Yuuki believed he should have stayed calm and patiently explained to him that the impact of a newspaper article is increased by the addition of a photograph. That it gives the story more weight. And his patience would have prevented another tragic traffic accident. Through the Mochizuki incident, Yuuki had come to realize that, with his lack of self-control, he should never be put in a position where he could exercise control over others.

  Yuuki had suspected for a while that he was able to love only people who loved him. And even when he was sure he had their love, he couldn’t forgive them if they were ever cool or indifferent toward him. He expected absolute, unconditional love, and when he realized how elusive that was, he would fall into utter despair. So, instead, he kept his distance from people. He was wary of anyone who showed him kindness and never let anyone see his private side. He was afraid of being hurt.