Once perception settles into a comfortable pattern, we fall asleep to it. Only when the pattern is broken do we notice there is a pattern at all. The chains of mental habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson.
Wit, whether visual or verbal, can make the commonplace uncommon again by breaking the habits that render perception routine. We tend to define the quality of wit as merely being deft with a clever comeback. But true wit is richer, cannier, more riddling. And the best of it is often based on a biological phenomenon called supernormal stimuli.
The Feast of the Seven Fishes is perhaps the most well-known tradition of Italian-American culture. Its roots, however, are vague and mysterious. Every year Italian-Americans look forward to an elaborate dinner full of branzino, angel hair with clam sauce, fried calamari (or coll-uh-mahd), and many other salty seafood standbys of the Mediterranean on the night before Christmas. And of course, baccalá, that most sacred of salted cod-type white fish, which is prepared by soaking it in the sink, night after night, for up to a week before the big meal, exorcising just the right amount of saltiness before cooking it up with onions and capers to complement our ocean’s most delicious scaly friend.
As he explains in the prologue to his novel Seventeen, Hideo Yokoyama was a young investigative journalist when, in the immediate aftermath of the crash, he made the eight-hour trek up Mount Takamagahara “with no routes or climbing trails” to guide him. He walked through the wreckage (“it was the rare lucky reporter who didn’t inadvertently step on a corpse”) and filed stories on what he witnessed. Just five years after CNN introduced the world to the 24-hour news cycle, this experience reinforced what Yokoyama had already begun to suspect — that “the kind of information we call news will always eventually evaporate, fade from memory,” even a story of the magnitude of JAL Flight 123. Soon after, he gave up his journalism career to write fiction. The crash would inspire his 2003 novel Climber’s High, which has been translated by Louise Heal Kawai and retitled Seventeen for English readers.
Seventeen is Yokoyama’s second novel to be translated into English. Like 2018’s Six Four, which was actually written and published in Japan nine years after Seventeen, it is difficult to classify. It’s not a thriller, per se, in the way that American fans might understand the genre (as a scan of the reader reviews on Goodreads confirms). There’s no crime. Most of the cinematic action occurs off the page. A mystery is introduced and wrapped up in approximately 10 pages. Seventeen is best described as “newsroom noir,” and put in the same category as films like The Post and Spotlight, but minus the scandalous exposés. What Yokoyama has written is, ultimately, more than your standard thriller. True to form, he has created a meditative and multilayered narrative that is as much about a man at a mid-life crossroads as it is about journalism or a plane crash.
Near the beginning of the third century B.C., the Republic of Rome faced an acute threat to its domination of the Italian peninsula. In a series of brutal battles, Pyrrhus of Epirus and a fearsome parade of 20 war elephants had managed to vanquish Rome’s armies. When Pyrrhus offered Rome a comparatively lenient peace treaty, many of its senior statesmen were keen to take the deal.
It was, Edward J. Watts shows in “Mortal Republic,” thanks to the unrivaled strength of Rome’s political institutions that Pyrrhus’ victories ultimately issued in his proverbial defeat. When the Senate convened to debate the offer, “an old, blind senator named Appius Claudius was carried into the Senate house by his sons.” As the chamber fell silent, he stood to chastise his colleagues. “I have,” he said, “long thought of the unfortunate state of my eyes as an affliction, but now that I hear you debate shameful resolutions which would diminish the glory of Rome, I wish that I were not only blind but also deaf.” By giving in to Pyrrhus, Claudius warned, the Roman Republic would only invite more outside powers to mess with it. Low as the odds of victory might be, Rome had no choice but to keep fighting.
The words were hidden under Notes
on my device. I thought I had written them
myself and admired how clever I must be.