The Summit of the Gods

A Japanese mountaineering photographer named Fukamachi finds an old camera in a Kathmandu shop that may have belonged to George Mallory, who died on Everest in 1924. The camera could prove whether Mallory reached the summit first, decades before Hillary. Chasing it pulls Fukamachi into the story of Habu Joji, a brilliant, obsessive climber who vanished from public life. Taniguchi adapts Baku Yumemakura's novel into five volumes of patient, detailed mountaineering, and the mystery of the camera matters less than the question it raises: why men climb at all, knowing it may kill them. The answer the book offers is not romantic. It is closer to compulsion.