Above 8,000 meters, where breath comes thin and time grows brittle, certainty erodes with every step. Nobukazu Kuriki kept going back to that edge—again and again—returning to Mount Everest eight times after losing nine fingers to frostbite. In a world that prizes summits and statistics, his story refuses to be simplified into either triumph or failure.
A singular obsession
Born in 1982, the Japanese alpinist carved a path defined by audacity and endurance. He first set his sights on Everest in the late 2000s and became known not only for how often he returned, but for when and how he tried. Kuriki favored post-monsoon attempts—autumn seasons when the jet stream often slams the peak, temperatures plummet, and summit windows are fleeting. He courted solitude, attempting routes when crowds had thinned and the mountain was colder, quieter, more hostile.
In 2012, during an autumn attempt on the West Ridge, Kuriki suffered catastrophic frostbite. By the time he reached safety, he had lost nine fingers, leaving him with only a single functioning thumb. For most climbers, such an outcome would be the end of high-altitude ambition. Kuriki saw an obstacle to be adapted to. He trained with modified tools, refined techniques that would allow him to grip and jumar, and returned to Everest.
What “solo” means on the world’s highest mountain
Kuriki often described his Everest ambition as solo and without supplemental oxygen. Those words carry weight in the climbing world. Since Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler first reached the summit without oxygen in 1978—and Messner’s solo ascent in 1980—such claims have signaled a purist ethic, a rarified commitment to confronting the mountain with fewer buffers.
Yet Everest in the modern era is a complex stage. Most expeditions, even those with solo intent, intersect with fixed ropes, established camps, and logistical help from Sherpa teams ferrying supplies and opening the route. Veteran climbers and chroniclers have long debated what counts as truly “solo” on a peak where infrastructure and rescue capacity—however limited—are part of the landscape. Kuriki’s approach sat inside that debate, underscoring a wider truth: on Everest, style is as contested as success.
Autumn’s narrow windows and mounting costs
Statistically and viscerally, autumn is a harsher roll of the dice than spring. The post-monsoon jet stream can park over the summit for weeks, shrouding ridges in spindrift and pushing wind chills to lethal extremes. Fewer climbers venture up, which means fewer hands to fix rope and fewer margins for error when things go wrong. In exchange, the mountain offers what some seek most: emptiness, silence, and a test unsoftened by the traffic and relative predictability of May.
Kuriki seemed drawn to that bargain. After his frostbite in 2012, he tested Everest again in multiple post-monsoon seasons, at times turning back from advancing weather, other times retreating due to fatigue and illness. The Himalayan Database, the long-standing record of Himalayan expeditions, lists the Japanese climber’s repeated attempts and retreats, a ledger that reads less like failure than an inventory of limits probed and recalibrated.
Final attempt and an unanswered question
In May 2018, Kuriki returned to Nepal for his eighth try on Everest, this time in the busier spring season. He set out on the mountain’s south side, advancing through the Khumbu Icefall and up the Western Cwm toward the upper camps. He reported feeling unwell near 7,000 meters and decided to turn back. He never made it down.
Nepalese officials later confirmed that Kuriki was found unresponsive in his tent near Camp Three, high on the Lhotse Face, while descending. The immediate cause was not publicly determined, a reminder that up high, illness blends with exhaustion, dehydration, and altitude into a dangerous fog. He was 35 years old.
The human calculus behind risk
After every high-profile death in the Himalaya, familiar arguments follow. Why take such risks? What is gained in repeating attempts that erode the body and endanger rescuers? On Everest—where the majority of summits rely on supplemental oxygen and the labor of Sherpas—the ethics of style and the boundaries of acceptable risk can be hard to disentangle from the commercial machinery of modern climbing.
Kuriki’s case complicates any easy narrative. He was neither a tourist swept along by a guiding company nor a cloistered ascetic operating far from the beaten path. He positioned himself somewhere between: a media-savvy alpinist with sponsors, an appetite for solitude, and a willingness to endure hardship that most people can barely imagine. He tried in autumn when the mountain was at its most closed, and he persisted after injuries that would have ended almost anyone’s climbing life.
The weight of style, the value of restraint
Style matters in alpinism because it speaks to respect—the measure of how much responsibility a climber assumes for their own safety and impact. On Everest, that conversation is fraught. Fixed lines and high-altitude porters make the mountain more accessible, but they also shift risk. Sherpa guides carry heavy loads through the Icefall, move first through avalanche paths, and shoulder disproportionate danger to enable the dreams of others.
Kuriki’s repeated return to the mountain drew admiration from some and criticism from others, especially after 2012, when his injuries demanded new methods and a different margin of error. The courage of persistence is compelling; the wisdom to turn around, again and again, is its own kind of mastery. That tension—the drive to push and the discipline to stop—sits at the heart of every expedition, and it is where debates over his legacy continue to live.
What remains after the summit fades
In the end, the significance of a climber’s life cannot be tallied in summits alone. For many, climbing is less about arrival than about the pursuit itself—the practice of confronting edges, learning where confidence ends and humility must take over. Kuriki’s record will always include a blank space where the top of the world might have been. But the imprint he left—on aspiring Japanese climbers, on the modern conversation about style, on the rugged ledger of autumn attempts—carries its own weight.
“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” — Sir Edmund Hillary
Everest exposes, as much as it elevates. It reveals the scaffolding of our choices: the logistics we lean on, the language we use to frame risk, the compromises we accept to keep moving upward. Kuriki believed the climb still mattered, even after unimaginable loss. That belief took him to the edge and, finally, beyond it.
