Seventeen

by Hideo Yokoyama

  Gunma Prefecture sets up own investigation team

  Foreign leaders offer messages of sympathy

  Nodai Niko baseball nine in shock

  Originally on waiting list for flight

  Unprecedented sum to be paid in compensation

  Aeronautics specialists offer theories

  Radioactive material in cargo

  Boeing investigators arrive in Japan

  JAL president Takagi hints at taking responsibility

  Safety myth debunked

  As soon as he read one, another landed on his desk. In brief breaks between working, Yuuki would take a moment to scan the TV images for his reporters. As he watched, he hit the redial button on his phone. The Anzais’ home number—his concern about that situation was also growing by the minute.

  “Anzai here…”

  It was Rintaro’s feeble voice.

  “This is Yuuki. You remember me?”

  “Um … yes.”

  “What’s happened to your father?”

  “He’s in the hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Is he ill? Injured?”

  “They said he collapsed…”

  So he hadn’t fallen from a cliff. But Yuuki didn’t know if he should feel relieved or not. He gripped the receiver more firmly.

  “Where was he when he collapsed? Do you know what caused it?”

  “I don’t know…”

  Rintaro’s voice began to break. He was probably in tears. Yuuki pictured his eyes—those big round eyes—the image of his father’s.

  “Did you go to the hospital to see him?” he asked, as gently as he could.

  “Yes. I’ve come back to get some pajamas for him.”

  “I see. I’m sorry I’m disturbing you. So, how’s your dad doing?”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Can you hear me?”

  “His eyes are open but he’s asleep.”

  Yuuki was horror-struck. Asleep with his eyes open? The doctor’s words, perhaps. He thought it was an awful way of putting it. He decided it would be cruel to try to make Rintaro say anything more. He asked for the name of the hospital and hung up.

  He wanted to go and visit Anzai straightaway, but in those few minutes that he’d been on the phone the pile of wires on his desk had gotten out of control.

  What did it mean, “His eyes are open but he’s asleep”? He couldn’t bear to sit around, not knowing. Anzai was at the prefectural hospital. If he just popped in to check on him, it’d take about an hour, round-trip. He could ask Nozawa to cover for him; surely even Nozawa wouldn’t begrudge him that.

  Nozawa was busy marking proofs of articles with a red pen, but his movements were out of the ordinary. His gaze was switching back and forth between the pile of papers in front of him and the TV screen. Yuuki saw it right away—Nozawa was checking on the crash scene and editing the articles at the same time. Yuuki began to pay closer attention to Nozawa’s hand movements. It was just as he thought—Nozawa was using the latest TV coverage to correct a Kyodo News eyewitness report and transform it into an NKT article.

  The blood rushed to Yuuki’s head. He snatched the article out of Nozawa’s hand, causing all the other papers on his desk to tumble to the floor. Nozawa stared at him in amazement.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Nozawa demanded.

  “I might ask you the same thing. Who told you to do this?”

  “Todoroki-san. My boss! If you have a problem with it, you’d better talk to him!”

  What the …

  The chief local news editor had instigated this? More than anyone in the whole company, Todoroki had always boasted of his involvement in the Okubo/Red Army cases. Still, now, he carried newspaper clippings from that period in his pocket diary. That was the kind of man he was, but this time, for once, he was keeping a low profile, sneaking around giving people these kinds of directions behind Yuuki’s back.

  Yuuki got up and walked purposefully over to the chief local news editor’s chair. Todoroki looked up. The thick dark lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles concealed a sharp, glowering gaze. To this day, he had the look of a true police beat reporter.

  “Sir?”

  “What is it?”

  “Can you please stop doing that?”

  “Doing what?”

  “The eyewitness articles.”

  “Can’t be helped. None of our guys made it.”

  “We don’t know that yet.”

  The tone of Yuuki’s voice made his feelings very clear. Todoroki’s reply was even clearer.

  “They won’t make it in time. Poor leadership on your part.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  Right as he spoke, he heard a voice behind him.

  “There’s Sayama!”

  Yuuki spun around to look. There he was, in the TV footage from the crash site. It was definitely Sayama. And there was Hanazawa, standing just behind him. Clothes in tatters, their rain-soaked hair plastered to their foreheads, they looked exhausted. But they were there! Someone from the North Kanto Times was standing on Mount Osutaka.

  Yuuki looked at the clock. It was 5:10 p.m. If Sayama were to head back now, he’d be climbing down the mountain in the dark. It was too dangerous, especially for someone without any climbing experience.

  But he knew Sayama. Somehow, he would get back. There was no way that man would give up his chance to get his byline on an article. Whether it was the riot police or the Self-Defense Forces, he’d find someone to tag along with and get down that mountain. Seven hours until the deadline. Or eight, in fact. Just like yesterday, they’d extend it by one hour. It looked like they’d just be able to get the article.

  Yuuki turned his attention back to Todoroki.

  “Sayama’ll be writing the feature article.”

  “If he makes it in time.”

  There was a hint of amusement in Todoroki’s eyes.

  Yuuki went back to his desk. He swallowed his anger, for now. If he didn’t, he’d never get his job done.

  But time rushed by. 9:00 p.m.… 10:00 … 11:00 …

  Just two hours left to the deadline. There’d been no contact from Sayama.

  There was nothing to do but wait. The layout of the city news pages had been completed. It consisted entirely of the Kyodo articles Nozawa had been working on. The moment they received Sayama’s draft, they would switch it around. The plan was in place, but still the phone didn’t ring. Time was steadily creeping up on Yuuki.

  Anxiety was stalking him, too. Since night had fallen, there had been one piece of bad news after the other. Mount Osutaka was a formidable mountain indeed. The reporters who’d struggled their way up to the top had been lucky to make it. Far more of them had gotten lost en route, found their path blocked by a cliff face, or collapsed from sheer exhaustion, the NKT party included. Out of the twelve staff members dispatched to the site, Sayama and Hanazawa were the only ones who’d made it.

  It was almost midnight. Yuuki was silently praying: It’ll be all right. They’ll make it back. Sayama knows what he’s doing. He’ll know we can put the deadline back an hour. He’s taken that into consideration. As soon as he gets back to civilization, he’ll find a phone and call in his story.

  “It’s about time to send it down.”

  The voice of the editor in chief came out of nowhere. Yuuki didn’t take in the meaning right away. Send it down … Send the paper down …

  Of course. Send it to press!

  Yuuki leapt from his seat. What the hell?

  “It’s going to press already?”

  The staff of the newsroom were already swarming out the door and downstairs to the Production Department, where the galleys would undergo a final proofread before being handed over to the printers. Kasuya was also heading toward the door.

  “Wait! There’s still another hour!” Yuuki bellowed.

  Kasuya turned around. He looked puzzled.

  “There’s
no extension today.”

  “Why not?”

  “I thought I’d said? The rotary press isn’t working properly. We’re going to have to use the old, slow one.”

  Yuuki thought he’d misheard. He’d been told nothing about this.

  No. Wait … This can’t be happening. No one told me …

  Slowly, Yuuki turned around. He focused on the chief local news editor’s desk. Todoroki sat there, no expression on his face, staring through his dark lenses into the distance.

  “If he makes it in time.”

  He’d seen the ghost of the Okubo/Red Army era. That had to be it. Todoroki didn’t want to publish an article on the world’s biggest air disaster with a junior reporter’s byline.

  His whole body trembled. Jealousy? Could jealousy make a man sink so low?

  In the lull that followed the exodus of all the newsroom staff, Todoroki stood up and headed toward the door. Yuuki let rip.

  “And you call yourself a reporter?”

  Todoroki faltered a moment, but he didn’t turn around, and continued out the door. Yuuki slumped down into his chair. Sayama was going to call. He had to wait for him. No escape from the newsroom yet. He’d been awake now for forty hours straight, but not a bit of him felt sleepy.

  It was half past midnight when the telephone on the JAL crash desk finally rang.

  “We’ve got our article. Sayama and Hanazawa reporting from Mount Osutaka…”

  It was a perfect feature piece, with punch and intensity. But it would never be printed. Yuuki couldn’t bring himself to tell Sayama that part.

  Sayama was still trying to catch his breath as he read his script. As Yuuki transcribed his words, he mentally prepared himself for the intense pressure that was going to weigh on the reporters of the new “JAL crash era.”

  7

  It was three o’clock in the morning.

  Yuuki left the newsroom and climbed the dark staircase. At the far end of the third-floor corridor was the on-call room, where the reporters on night duty could catch up on some sleep, or occasionally people stayed when they couldn’t make it home. He turned on the air conditioner and flopped down on the bunk by the wall. He’d known he couldn’t trust himself to drive home safely. It was more than just a headache he had; his brain felt swollen, as if it were trying to burst out of his skull. He’d felt this way for hours.

  Five hundred and twenty dead. The world’s biggest single-aircraft crash.

  He hadn’t expected the job of JAL crash desk chief to be this tough. It was a job that was far beyond his capabilities, he believed. And it had only just begun. It was now thirty-two hours since Japan Airlines Flight 123 had crashed into Mount Osutaka in Uenomura, Gunma Prefecture. And still, only two morning editions of his newspaper had been published since then.

  He’d asked the night-duty reporters to wake him at six. There was an internal phone line by his bed. Yuuki pulled off his sweat-stained necktie with one hand and with the other dragged the pillow under his head. A sour smell enveloped him: the body odor of junior reporters. Yuuki, who had long since moved on from the night shift, felt a pang of nostalgia, along with a sense of loss. When he’d been constantly flitting about as a young reporter on the police beat, this bunk had been a kind of perch. In between chasing down news stories late at night and the next dawn attack, he’d rest his wings here for a while. However, his mind would never fully switch off, and he’d dream short, vivid dreams, tinged with ambition.

  In the back of his mind, he could see Sayama’s angular face.

  Under the blazing hot sun in the middle of summer, Sayama had fought his way for twelve hours through a forest with no clear paths to get up Mount Osutaka. He’d come down the mountain in the dark, literally risking death to carry out the orders of a local newspaper, to relay by telephone his eyewitness account of the accident scene. And yet, at this very moment, the North Kanto Times was being delivered to households throughout the prefecture without that reporter’s byline. All because Todoroki, the ex–star reporter of the Okubo/Red Army era, couldn’t stand the idea of a new star being born.

  Sayama had missed his opportunity to carve a name for himself in the history of the North Kanto Times.

  How would he react? Yuuki wondered. Sayama was one of the best interviewers they had. He’d long established his reputation as a leading reporter at the North Kanto Times. And he was probably one of the strongest-willed people at the newspaper. Sayama’s attitude could potentially cause problems with future coverage of the accident.

  Sayama’d get his revenge, he thought vaguely. But as he turned on his side to sleep, the reporter’s face faded from his head … It was Anzai who concerned him now. He could still hear Rintaro’s feeble voice.

  “His eyes are open but he’s asleep.”

  At 7:00 a.m. they’d have the morning planning meeting. After that was over, he’d have a little spare time. He could probably rush home, then go straight from there to the hospital. He needed to hear what was going on directly from Anzai’s wife. Probably it wasn’t anything that serious, after all … Not Anzai—he was as strong as an ox …

  He lay there thinking and, gradually, the sound of his own breathing took over.

  Only a few seconds later—or that was how it seemed—something or someone was shaking him vigorously.

  “Wake up!”

  Yuuki sat up like a jack-in-the-box. He had difficulty opening his eyes right away, as his eyelids were still sticky with sleep. But he recognized the voice. It was the general manager from the Advertising Department, Kurasaka, a colleague of Miyata’s.

  He wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve, and it was as he’d thought—he was looking into the bright red square face of Kurasaka.

  “What the hell is this?” he roared, shoving a newspaper under Yuuki’s nose. “What have you done?”

  It was a folded copy of this morning’s edition, with the second page of local news on top, on the right-hand side. Yuuki finally found words.

  “What is it?”

  He looked up at the clock. Six ten a.m. He’d been asleep for three hours.

  “Are you stupid? The ad! Local news, second page, five full columns. It’s missing!”

  It came back to him. Last night one photo after another of the crash site had arrived from Kyodo News. He couldn’t bear to discard any of them. He’d told the copy team to put them all in. After a while the copy people had come back to him to say there wasn’t enough space for all the photos, and Yuuki had yelled at them to get rid of some of those damn ads if they had to.

  He’d meant to ask senior management to let Advertising know that they were removing one of their pieces, but he’d forgotten. He’d been distracted by worries about Sayama’s safety and Anzai being in the hospital, and it had completely slipped his mind.

  Wide-awake now, Yuuki put his feet on the floor and sat up properly.

  “I’m sorry. I took it out.”

  “Orders from the top?”

  “No, it was my decision.”

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I had photos of the crash scene that I couldn’t leave out.”

  “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  Threateningly, Kurasaka reached into his breast pocket and snatched out another piece of paper. He unfolded it roughly and threw it down on the bed. It was the proofs for an advertisement, the one that should have appeared in this morning’s edition.

  TAKASAKI MALL GRAND OPENING TODAY!

  It was an ad for the opening of what was proudly touted as Takasaki City’s biggest shopping center.

  Yuuki felt faint all of a sudden. The announcement of the mall’s opening had been left out of the paper on the very day it opened. He bowed his head deeply.

  “It was a very careless mistake.”

  Kurasaka went on the attack.

  “You think apologizing is going to solve the problem? It can’t be fixed now. How exactly do you intend to take responsibility for this mess?

  “Their sales pr
omotion people said they were only going to put it in the Jomo, so Ikeyama from our department did everything he could to talk them into going with us, too. And that took some doing. He had to go down on hands and knees and beg them. Do you have any idea how that feels?”

  “I’m really sorry. The crash was such big news, I didn’t stop and think.”

  “The crash was such big news? Are you kidding me? If something had happened to the emperor, maybe, but some plane going down? That kind of shit’s not worth pulling an ad for!”

  Yuuki stared Kurasaka in the face. Some plane going down? That kind of shit?

  Kurasaka was a couple of years older than Yuuki, and had started out in the Editorial Department. He had spent a long time covering politics, but last spring he’d been lured away by the offer of promotion to manager. He’d moved down to the Advertising Department on the ground floor. Yuuki might have been able to forgive a man who had never been anything but an advertising guy. But not this ex-reporter.

  Yuuki leaned toward Kurasaka.

  “You’re a manager. You get it. This was no ordinary crash.”

  Kurasaka clenched his jaw defiantly.

  “Why? They never pulled an ad in the Okubo/Red Army days. Back then, they used to pull one or two articles, a photo or two, to make room for the ads. Because they understood that advertising’s our bread and butter.”

  Yuuki’s expression hardened.

  “What’s that face for? Look, Yuuki, you know how much a five-column ad’s worth?”

  Their newspaper was made of fifteen vertical columns per page, so a five-column advertisement would be a pretty big one, at a third of a page.

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “One million and twenty-five thousand yen.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really! You guys have no idea how hard we work. You all have it so easy.”

  “Easy?”

  “You don’t have to earn a single yen for the company. We’re the ones who earn your living for you.”

  It was less than a year and a half since Kurasaka had been transferred to Advertising. This was hardly the way an ex-writer should speak. Yuuki couldn’t believe his total turnaround in attitude. His blood began to boil.

  “At a newspaper company, it’s the newspaper itself that’s the product. We writers are in the business of creating a newspaper. Don’t you dare tell us we’re not earning the company any income.”