Twenty-Four Eyes in 10 Minutes — How One Classroom Remembers the Missing

The Roll Book Starts Thinning From the First Page

The first roll is neat and complete. The twelve children move up from first grade toward the higher years, and who sits in front, who talks too much, whose family lives by the water, all of it is packed into one classroom. When a household on the island puts out to sea, the classroom loses one familiar voice; when a child falls ill, the teacher has to face the desk left empty. The days move forward through roll call, lessons, and the walk home, while the scenery keeps returning to the same Seto Inland Sea.

A few years on, Isokichi's name is the first to vanish from the roll book. The boy walked with a slight limp from the start, and poverty and lung disease take him early; the classroom is short one chair from then on. Tsuboi never lets his death settle into a line of mourning. Her pen lands only on the moment his name is struck out, and from that instant the empty seat stops being a mere absence and starts being counted, one by one. The desk in the corner of the room is a place the light seems to avoid ever after.

Once Isokichi is gone, his sister Koiso's name is still there on the line above his. Her brother's name stays crossed out; she herself later becomes one more name recorded, page by page, in that same book. Tsuboi says nothing about it directly — she simply sets the two names, brother and sister, a few pages apart and lets the reader do the comparing. What she is writing down is whether a name is there or not, not whether the sickness or the poverty is there or not.

Over these twenty years, the children slowly reach the age when they leave the island. Kichiji, Matsui, and the other boys put on uniforms; send-off banners go up in the school corridor, and people at the edge of the village wave them off. However loud the slogans on those banners get, Tsuboi never takes the reader to the battlefield. She writes only of Miss Oishi coming back to the classroom, counting the seats again, finding one more empty chair each year. Miss Oishi's hand stops still on the roll book, and outside the window the sea goes on catching the light as always. By writing the absence itself, the antiwar argument lands in the most ordinary place there is.

It is not only the boys' seats that go empty. In Kayo's house, once the men are taken by the war, she is left too young to carry the weight adults are supposed to carry; Takeichi grows to the age when he is sent away, and no one calls his childhood name down the pine path along the shore anymore. Tsuboi writes no farewell scene — only the moment each name gets skipped in the roll book. One skipped line is enough to say a household's sky has fallen in.

I first understood the power of this book through the way it turns war into an empty seat in a classroom. The reader never has to see gunfire to feel that once someone has been taken away, a patch of sunlight is missing from the desk.

After the War Ends, the List Is Still Being Counted

The war ends, but fewer and fewer of the island's men come home. The sea is still the same sea, the pine path to school still runs the same way; only the faces in the classroom have changed. Miss Oishi keeps the branch school alone, opens the roll book worn thin by time, and reads down the names from the first one again. Some answer; some stay silent. The book itself has not gotten any thinner. What has thinned is the life behind each name.

Among the twelve names, several go unanswered when they are called. Poverty, illness, war, and blindness take the twenty-four eyes away one by one. The quietest moment in the book, and the hardest to sit still through, comes when Miss Oishi takes the hand of the one surviving girl who can no longer see the classroom, and lets her know she has not been forgotten in that book. Tsuboi stops right there and does not take a single step further.

The Scenery Stays the Same; the List Does Not

Twenty-Four Eyes keeps returning to the same sea, the stone steps, the fishing nets, the pine path, and the schoolyard by the water on Shodoshima. Time seems to circle in the sea wind, while the people keep aging forward regardless. The same view comes back year after year, like a series of return visits, and it seems to keep asking the same question: where did the child who sat here yesterday go today? The repetition makes nature look constant and loyal, and makes every human disappearance stand out all the more.