{"id":418752,"date":"2019-04-16T10:00:46","date_gmt":"2019-04-16T14:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=418752"},"modified":"2019-04-17T09:31:57","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T13:31:57","slug":"seventeen-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/04\/16\/seventeen-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"Seventeen [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Adam Hetherington<\/strong> is a reader and a BTBA judge.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Seventeen <\/em><\/a>by Hideo Yokoyama, translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai (Japan, FSG)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In August of 1985, Japan Airlines (JAL) Flight 123 crashed into Mt. Osutaka in the Gunma Prefecture, killing 520 people. Hideo Yokoyama\u2019s <\/span>Seventeen<\/span><\/i><\/a> recounts this tragedy from a unique perspective, as the author was employed at the local newspaper<\/span>\u2014<\/span>the <\/span>North Kanto Times<\/span><\/i> (or NKT)<\/span>\u2014<\/span><\/i>at that time. From the preface:<\/span><\/p>\n

At the time, I was working as an investigative\/police beat reporter at a local Gunma newspaper. I arrived at the crash site after trekking for more than eight hours up a mountain with no routes or climbing trails. The terrain was steep, unimaginably narrow, and it was the rare lucky reporter who didn\u2019t inadvertently step on a corpse.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yokoyama, an investigative reporter and an amateur climber, was dispatched up the mountain to the crash site, while his character Kazumasa Yuuki manages the coverage from the office. It\u2019s impossible to know which aspects of the novel are lifted verbatim from Yokoyama\u2019s experience and which are fiction, but the distance of the character Yuuki\u2019s position from Yokoyama\u2019s own leaves room for a further type of reportage: a device to cleanly separate an individual character from the intertwining of the known personal and larger, newsworthy histories. <\/span><\/p>\n

This type of disentanglement of the individual pieces of a book played a part in <\/span>Six Four<\/span><\/i><\/a>, Hideo Yokoyama\u2019s only other novel available in English (translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies), too. It used the lure of an unsolved crime to examine the structure of Japan\u2019s police. It was sold as a crime thriller, and while it did technically contain all the spinning gears generally associated with thrillers, it was not particularly thrilling. The book moved slowly, accumulating a mass of detail through something like the interrogation of the procedural genre itself. You could maybe call it meta-procedural, or a deconstructed thriller, though both of these terms seem to imply a level of formal experimentation that isn\u2019t really present. Its differentiation from most other crime novels is Yokoyama\u2019s un-exploitative realism. Thrillers often work through exaggeration<\/span>\u2014<\/span>characters are reducible to one thing: genius, evil, dumb, funny, crass, sexy, etc; coincidences are numerous and fortuitous; the lives inside the plot are all moving toward something recognizable and tidy, not so different from episodic crime TV shows. Yokoyama\u2019s fiction works though the incremental recreation of life. Indirect, branching, stalling, lovely life. Rather than a cat-and-mouse game of clues, we get a character map of action and empathy over time, revealed through the repeated sounding-out of the overlapping bureaucratic silences that make up the structure of the police itself. <\/span>Six Four<\/span><\/i> is a moving, beautiful novel, largely consisting of things almost happening. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"In his book <\/span>Sculpting in Time<\/span><\/i> (translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair), Andrei Tarkovsky wrote \u201cThe aim of art is to prepare a person for death.\u201d Yokoyama\u2019s <\/span>Seventeen<\/span><\/i>, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, somewhat reverses this. The events surrounding the investigation into the crash that caused 520 deaths prepare Yuuki for the beauty available in his own life. He is a flawed, frustrating protagonist: quick to anger, fairly self-aware without any drive for self-improvement, and introspective without ever applying any of what he discovers about himself to daily existence. When we meet him, he\u2019s simply aware of the conditions of his life, and of the conditions his sometimes horrible actions cause in the lives of others. He is sinking into his own existence, avoiding change or growth. But later, Yuuki<\/span>\u2014<\/span>outwardly stoic in complacency, inwardly clear-eyed about his shortcomings<\/span>\u2014<\/span>finds a type of personal success in the newspaper\u2019s investigation in an unexpected way. Despite himself, he is able to withstand the absolute crush of capitalism on the news. Yuuki stands up to everyone. He demands integrity from a bureaucracy, and somehow he gets it, though at great personal cost. Through the competing pressures of a life realized through an investigation, Yokoyama again shows us the organizational structure of a job, and of its place in Japanese society. This is his brilliance, I think; his ability to describe one knot while untangling another. I actually didn\u2019t plan on writing about what the book is so much as what it does, and I think in doing so, I\u2019ve undersold something: how emotional it is, and how bare it left me. It\u2019s a very careful book, almost understated, and it\u2019s about a circumspect person, but it\u2019s not at all cold. Yuuki transcends what he thought he could do professionally, which is who he thought he was personally, which then in turn slightly changes who he is as a person. I don\u2019t want to overstate Yuuki\u2019s redemption or transformation, but some things do change for him, and through this, that un-exploitave realism I mentioned earlier becomes emotionally animate. With the steady, measured prose of Yokoyama and Heal Kawai serving as scaffolding, Yuuki\u2019s growth and personal interactions begin to resonate like the advent of technicolor; the landscape of his purposefully flat life begins to pile and erode. I don\u2019t want to give any specifics here (apologies for pitching you half a plot in this post; I don\u2019t really care about giving spoilers generally, but I do worry that in this case the bell might ring a little less true if you expect to hear it), but the book has a kind of plain honesty that put me in mind of John Williams\u2019s Stoner<\/em>, though that\u2019s all they have in common. The judges for this award have had a group text going since last summer, and while I\u2019m not going to tip any hands except my own, I will tell you I\u2019m not the only person who admitted to crying more than once while reading this book. <\/span>Seventeen<\/span><\/i> is a marvel. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"This is a great novel about a newspaper, and it was released in English in 2018. This alone gives it weight. When I sat down to write this, I was actually planning on writing this whole post about how<\/span> Seventeen<\/span><\/i> is an indictment of our 24 hour news cycle. This was not Yokoyama\u2019s intent (Death of the Author and all that) at all, though the repudiation is total. His constant interrogation of fact, of the motive for gathering that fact, and of both the <\/span>cost of<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>motive for<\/span><\/i> sharing that fact feels like the polar opposite of what we have today. In <\/span>Seventeen<\/span><\/i> there\u2019s still a struggle against the influence of profit on news, a ghost we\u2019ve almost given up here in the United States. We\u2019ve all lost friends and family to things like Fox, to news that exists as a profitable business model, first and foremost, selling the pyramid scheme of itself to people who should have known better. To being sold the idea that a person is right to live in fear, and because they\u2019re absolutely right to be scared, their hatred of what they fear is both moral and intellectual; to right-wing journalists who are making a goddamn mint reinforcing this, telling people that what they\u2019re already doing (being noisy about their willful ignorance) is right, and that unlike everyone else in history, they don\u2019t need any introspection or change, or to apologize for anything, ever<\/span>\u2014<\/span>they just need to keep tuning in; and to an entire religion that has been warped beyond belief<\/span>, to allow its adherents to believe that because they are Christian, all the things they say and do are Good, <\/span>and so it\u2019s actually perfectly fine when they made the least Christlike man I\u2019ve ever heard of president, still no cause for introspection or alarm; and to the cult of defending the president, a uniquely stupid, cruel man, who was born rich and doesn\u2019t believe in anything, and who has never really worked: he\u2019s never dug a hole, never cleaned a toilet, never counted down a till, never sold a book, never read an entire book, never loaded a dishwasher, never swung a hammer, never swept or mopped, never needed a paycheck on Friday. This kind of stuff is not in the book, but you can imagine how a novel about a newspaper doing the right thing could drag this out of a person. I\u2019ll stop. <\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, <\/span>Seventeen<\/span><\/i> is a book about the effect of the application of integrity<\/span>\u2014a thing available to all\u2014<\/span> to a life, and that gives me hope, which is as good a reason as any for a book to win.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Adam Hetherington is a reader and a BTBA judge. Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama, translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai (Japan, FSG) In August of 1985, Japan Airlines (JAL) Flight 123 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":411442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[67796,68212,68242,68222,37876],"class_list":["post-418752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-adam-hetherington","tag-hideo-yokoyama","tag-louise-heal-kawai","tag-seventeen","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418752"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":418912,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418752\/revisions\/418912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}