Seventeen

by Hideo Yokoyama

  He really wanted to let Sayama go, but in his absence there would be no core team working with police headquarters. And if the plane really had gone down in Gunma Prefecture, Yuuki was going to have to assign twenty or thirty more reporters. He didn’t know how he was going to supervise them all. A feeling close to a prayer came bubbling up.

  Let it be Nagano!

  He couldn’t believe he was even thinking that. Now he felt even less confident of his abilities.

  There was no other reporter who Yuuki was as close to or trusted as completely as Sayama. He was thirty-three years old, with ten years’ experience at the newspaper. He was also highly regarded by all the young reporters. With Sayama next in the chain of command, Yuuki could get full cooperation. He couldn’t see any other way of managing the coverage.

  He knew he owed Sayama for the Ryota Mochizuki incident. Yuuki hadn’t asked for Sayama’s support—in fact, he’d tried to hold him back. But it was still the case that Sayama had saved him. If Sayama hadn’t been so eloquent, Yuuki would have been at the mercy of the powers that be in the Editorial Department or General Affairs.

  Sayama was the only one who liked him. That was what he secretly believed. And one thing that Yuuki and Sayama had in common was that Sayama had also had a hard time with his father. There were seven years between them and sometimes it felt as if Sayama were his little brother.

  “Yuuki-san!”

  “Okay, then.” Yuuki said it knowing he was caving in to pressure. “Go. But get there, gather your information, and get it back here as quickly as possible. And promise me you won’t set foot on that mountain before sunrise.”

  “Got it. Thank you,” Sayama replied briskly. “And can I take a photographer?”

  “There aren’t any. Apart from the one I already sent up to Budotoge, they’re all covering the baseball games.”

  “I see. Then I’ll take Hanazawa from the press club with me.”

  “Wait!” said Yuuki hurriedly. “There’s one more thing. There’s a guy in Advertising by the name of Miyata. Take him along, too.”

  “What?”

  Sayama didn’t sound pleased.

  “You know him, don’t you? The ad designer—”

  “I know him,” Sayama interrupted. “Heavily tanned, wears glasses. Why do we have to take him with us?”

  “He knows his way around mountains. He’d definitely be useful.”

  “You must be kidding. This is the real thing here. There’s no room for some flashy adman who gets his kicks from prancing around in the mountains.”

  What he meant was, Don’t diminish the value of our work.

  Yuuki felt his blood rise. It was on the tip of his tongue.

  Who are you to take that tone? You’re little more than a junior reporter yourself!

  His savage side was stirring. Or rather, the side of Yuuki that, for the past thirteen years, he’d been denying existed. He knew he, too, had been carrying around a belief in his own self-importance ever since the Okubo/Red Army years.

  But he replaced the receiver without saying a word.

  Yuuki’s left elbow was resting on his desk, and now he noticed it was being jiggled around. Nozawa was tapping his foot nervously, and the tip of his toe was rubbing against the leg of Yuuki’s desk. Yuuki glared at him.

  “Stop it.”

  It was at that moment that the announcement came. The chief copy editor, Kamejima, called from across the room, his circular face animated.

  “Yuuki! Look at the TV!”

  Yuuki stood up and looked at the screen. The announcer was just saying that they’d been able to determine the scene of the crash—the north face of Mount Ogura in Kitaaikimura, Minamisaku District, Nagano Prefecture …

  “What the…?”

  Yuuki paged Sayama immediately, but there was no response. Ten minutes, fifteen, went by, but still he didn’t call back. He must have decided not to get in contact again until he reached Uenomura.

  He’d fooled Yuuki … No, he wouldn’t have lied just to get to go to the crash site. He wasn’t the sort of person to resort to something like that. News was always a tricky business. But still, it was true that Sayama had refused to follow Yuuki’s instructions.

  He felt uneasy and irritated. He was unable to control his one and only subordinate. He was forced to admit that he was completely powerless.

  But never mind about that for now. The deadline was getting closer, and everyone was yelling and shouting.

  Nagano being the crash site was still only a theory. The rest of the TV report had been very fuzzy on details. Mount Ogura? Kogurayama? Senpeizan? Mikuniyama? All the possible locations flashed through Yuuki’s mind.

  It was half past midnight—thirty minutes left until the deadline. The newsroom was at the peak of activity. Kamejima came toward him, his expression uncharacteristically stern.

  “Which one are we going with?”

  He laid out two versions of the headline side by side on Yuuki’s desk.

  MOUNTAINS ON THE NAGANO-GUNMA BORDER

  MOUNTAINS ON THE GUNMA-NAGANO BORDER

  By rights the final decision about headlines should go to the chief copy editor—in other words, Kamejima himself. But Yuuki had been given the role of supervisor, so this time Kamejima deferred to him. Instead, though, he’d put Yuuki in a difficult position.

  He compared the two headlines. All around him, his colleagues were holding their breath. He reached out and, as if possessed, his hand went to the one on the right: MOUNTAINS ON THE NAGANO-GUNMA BORDER.

  It wasn’t so much a decision as a hope.

  He suddenly felt like throwing up. But that visceral physical reaction that seemed to be telling him all hope was lost was just a hint of what was in store in that long, hot “JAL crash summer.”

  6

  One after the other, delivery vans with the bold insignia NKT running along both sides sped out of the office gates.

  Ever since the layout had been finalized and turned over to the Printing Department, information had gone backward and forward between Nagano and Gunma as the location of the crash site. According to the reporters camped up at Uenomura, a search party made up of police officers from both prefectures, along with the Self-Defense Forces and the local fire departments—more than a thousand people in total—had been working all night without a break. Not only did they have no precise information as to the location of the site, the mountainous terrain was treacherous. Until about a decade before, the area around Uenomura had been known as the Tibet of the Kanto region. The reality was that no one would know anything for sure until morning.

  Around three hundred members of Japan’s press corps had driven up to Budotoge Ridge by car, causing a huge traffic jam. The TV channels were endlessly repeating all 524 names on the manifest.

  It was 3:00 a.m. The newsroom was as silent as a geriatric ward. More than a third of the staff had made the decision to stay all night, but now exhaustion showed on every face. People had collapsed on sofas or had their heads down on their desks. In about another hour it would start to get light, and bodies and voices were getting a little rest before the fight recommenced.

  The TV sounded the first battle cry of the morning. Just after 5:00 a.m., all stations simultaneously began to broadcast footage taken from a helicopter circling the crash site. Shouts went up around the room. Like boxers after the one-minute break between rounds, everyone leapt to their feet and converged on the TV set.

  What they saw was nothing like they’d imagined. There was no sign of anything resembling a jumbo jet. There were beautiful green hills—and then, in sharp relief, shredded remains. An L-shaped piece here, a V-shaped bit there, something resembling a boomerang … As the camera angle changed, their shapes shifted. White smoke rose. There was no sign of the wings. The letters JAL could be made out. But that was about it. There was nothing else left of the fuselage. Where on earth could the main body of the aircraft be? Had it fallen into a valley somewhere? The surface of the mountain glittered, just
like a road covered with shards of glass from a car headlight after a traffic accident.

  Startled, Yuuki looked away—down at the surface of his desk. A copy of the morning edition lay there, hot off the press, with a photo of a jumbo jet, the same model as Flight 123.

  A shiver ran up his spine. The jet had been smashed into little pieces. Those glittering fragments reflecting the morning sun—a mere twelve hours ago, they had been a giant passenger plane, calmly flying along with more than five hundred human beings on board.

  Yes, the people. The people on board had also been smashed into little pieces. He felt a hot wave of anger begin to build. Why had this plane come down? He began to wonder for the first time about the cause of the crash.

  The TV journalist in the helicopter was doing his best to shout over the roar of the blades.

  “This is Gunma. The crash site is most definitely inside Gunma Prefecture!”

  Ding-dong! It was the Kyodo News chime.

  The crash site is Uenomura in the Tano District of Gunma Prefecture.

  There was no reaction. As if everybody in the newsroom had just realized that they were in it for the long haul, they sat and stared at the TV screen. Five hundred and twenty-four people had died on that mountain. That sparkling mountain.

  In the still of the newsroom, muted voices started up like pattering raindrops. The drops grew to a shower, eventually becoming a full-on downpour. And, with that, the newsroom was back to normal.

  Hearing the crash site was in Gunma, the three managers directly under editor in chief Kasuya, who had gone home in the early hours, came straight back to the office, their expressions shocked.

  A little while later, the mountain was identified by name: Mount Osutaka. Osutaka had always had a formidable, almost spiritual reputation. Yuuki was shaken by the sound of its name. The previous night, of all the mountains he’d imagined, not once had that one occurred to him. But now that he heard it, it seemed to make sense that Osutaka, more than any other mountain, was the one to go down in history as the scene of a fatal accident.

  In fact, there was nothing strange about it being Mount Osutaka. Several thousands of pairs of eyes were scouring the crash site right now. Right now, tens—no, hundreds—of thousands of pairs of eyes were focused on maps. How had Mount Osutaka managed to conceal itself so well until now?

  Because it was mourning the dead.

  It was something he recalled from a story his mother had told him. When he was a child, she would get drunk and tell him traditional folk stories. He closed his eyes.

  His mind was awash with all sorts of shameful thoughts. He wanted more than anything just to get out of there. If it had been Nagano, he wouldn’t have cared whether it was five hundred or a thousand people who had died. He opened his eyes again and looked at the TV images of Mount Osutaka.

  And suddenly he was wide-awake.

  “Bring me a map!” he yelled.

  Along with around ten of his colleagues, he studied the routes up the mountain. Budotoge Ridge was in the wrong direction. If, instead, they went up the road toward Hamadaira Hot Springs, then followed the Kanna River through the forest until the path ended … then climbed up along the bed of a tiny mountain stream … Well, they couldn’t tell if it was the best way, but according to this map it was definitely the shortest route up Mount Osutaka. They calculated that, if all went well, the party he had sent out could reach the crash site in three to four hours. Yuuki paged the reporters and the photographer. The first to respond was Wajima, the number-two reporter at police headquarters.

  “Okay, you can start climbing. Follow the firefighters up. If you can’t find them, follow the police rescue team or the Self-Defense Forces.”

  Yuuki had received word that the search party had grown to around four thousand people. The reporters were going to have to rely on them. As long as they didn’t set off in completely the opposite direction, they’d be able to avoid the danger of climbing alone.

  “If anything goes wrong, if you have an accident or something, get hold of a Kyodo News reporter. Get them to give you ten seconds of wireless time. Beg them to send a message to the Maebashi city office.”

  “Understood.”

  Wajima’s voice was strained. Yuuki had heard rumors that he was rather timid for a reporter.

  Yuuki lowered his voice.

  “How’s Sayama doing? Was he at the incident room?”

  “Yes, they left earlier, saying they were going to take the route from Minamiaiki in Nagano. They heard from the Self-Defense Forces guys that was the quickest way.”

  The information was vague, but there was nothing he could do about it. If Sayama and Hanazawa had already crossed Budotoge Ridge, then their pagers must be out of range.

  “Okay. You’d better set out now. Don’t push it too much, okay? If it gets too difficult to continue, come back down right away.”

  At 6:00 a.m., Yuuki took part in a meeting of the top Editorial Department managers. How much space should they allocate to the story? Obviously the front page and the local section—a total of twelve pages, including photos—would be dedicated entirely to articles related to the crash. Stories about the Ministry of Transport and Japan Airlines, as well as the relatives of the victims in Tokyo or Osaka, would be put together mostly from Kyodo News wires, but everything that happened in Gunma Prefecture would be written by North Kanto Times staff. It was agreed that all crash-site eyewitness pieces would carry the bylines of the paper’s own reporters.

  For quite a while after the meeting, Yuuki was busy preparing the stories for publication. Around half past eight, he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Miyata from Advertising. It seemed he’d taken the day off and had been on standby at home, expecting to be asked to climb. Yuuki began to apologize, but Miyata interrupted him. He looked worried. There was something more important he’d come to tell Yuuki.

  “Anzai-san’s been taken to the hospital.”

  He must have fallen. Yuuki began to tremble. In his imagination, all he could see was his friend slipping on the rock face … He swallowed.

  “Tsuitate?”

  “I’m sorry? What?”

  Miyata had no idea that the two men had planned to climb Tsuitate that day. He’d been waiting since early morning for a call from Yuuki, and when none came he’d decided to call Anzai to find out what was going on.

  “His kid answered. He wasn’t very clear on the details, but it seems Anzai-san was taken to the hospital and his wife is there with him.”

  That must have been Anzai’s son, Rintaro. He was the same age as Yuuki’s boy, Jun. The first year of junior high school, but he still looked like a fourth- or fifth-year at primary school. He was painfully shy, and if you asked him a question he never really answered properly, just as Miyata had said. Still, according to both his parents, Rintaro was really fond of Yuuki. Yuuki would never have guessed.

  “Thanks. I’ll try to get some more information out of him.”

  Yuuki called Anzai’s house right away. Rintaro must have gone out—to school or the hospital. Yuuki really wanted to know what had happened. Why had Anzai been taken to the hospital? Had he climbed Tsuitate alone? And then … No, Anzai would be the last person to attempt something that dangerous.

  This made him think of Mount Osutaka. Was that dangerous, too? In the TV footage, the slope’s gradient had looked fairly gentle overall, but here and there he’d seen much steeper parts. Was it going to be more difficult than anyone could have foreseen? No, really, it hadn’t looked that bad. Perhaps the reporters and photographers would make it up there as planned … As he thought about this, the chime sounded again.

  Four survivors have been found at the scene.

  It was mind-blowing information. People had actually survived—a young girl, a mother and daughter, and a young woman. In all his time at the company, Yuuki thought he’d never witnessed scenes of such jubilation. The whole newsroom was rejoicing. It was a miracle.

  “Fuji TV’s showing it!”


  It was the young girl being rescued. A member of the Self-Defense Forces held her little body in his arms as the two of them were hoisted into the air by a rope up into a helicopter.

  Cheers went up in the newsroom. Applause. Even whistles. This was why he would never give up reporting. Because, sometimes, these things happened. So many smiling faces …

  Four survivors. There was going to have to be a major reorganization of the local news pages. Yuuki chose four reporters to cover the hospital nearest the crash site and sent them to get ready to leave immediately.

  But what had happened to the reporters at the crash site? It was past two in the afternoon now, coming up on three. Yuuki began to get agitated. He glanced at the TV screen and saw faces he recognized: a chief inspector, a detective, the riot police commander. The uniforms of the Self-Defense Forces and the fire department were also clearly visible. Among them were people who looked like media representatives. But his men were not there. He didn’t spot a single face of a North Kanto Times reporter or photographer.

  All in all, he had sent a total of twelve reporters and photographers to Mount Osutaka. Had not one of them made it to the crash site? What about the byline articles? Kyodo News Service had already sent eyewitness pieces. At this rate, the world’s biggest air disaster would have happened on the North Kanto Times’s doorstep and the local paper was going to have to print eyewitness accounts written by someone else.

  It was humiliating. Eyewitness pieces were different from straight news articles. There was a reporter’s point of view, a North Kanto Times point of view. It was a place to observe, feel, and write your own thoughts. If reporters who were born and raised in Gunma wrote about cases and accidents that happened in Gunma, they brought a deeper knowledge and feeling to the text. In other words, a sense of pride. The NKT was in North Kanto, and its reporters should be the ones to write the feature stories, Yuuki believed. No question.

  As the clock hands passed 4:00 p.m. the news wires on Yuuki’s desk continued to pile up.

  Fifty-two bodies recovered

  Tailpiece found in sea off Miura Peninsula