Based on the popular novel by Sakae Tsuboi, Twenty-Four Eyes opens in 1928 with the arrival of the fresh-faced Hisako Oishi (Hideko Takamine) in a small fishing village on Shodoshima, the second largest island in Japan’s inland sea. Although she lives on the other side of the island, she is a virtual stranger in this village, and she makes an immediate impression and draws stares from the poor villagers were her “modernity” (she rides a bicycle and wears a Western style suit). This is the first of the film’s many lessons in the difference between outward appearances and internal intentions, as Oishi’s dress and mode of transportation are purely functional in nature (“What am I supposed to do, walk 10 miles in a kimono?” she later asks her mother). It is also the first of many times we will see Oishi respond to negativity with the kind of grace and humility most of us only wish we had.

Oishi’s job is to teach a classroom full of elementary-age students, each of whom she shows respect and affection, even the supposed classroom bully whom she gently chides into sweeter behavior. The children immediately take to her precisely because of the way she treats them, and like any great teacher she makes learning both enjoyable and meaningful, although it seems like they spend an awful lot of time outdoors singing old Japanese folk songs. Kinoshita and his cinematographer Hiroyuki Kusuda (who also happened to be his brother-in-law) constantly emphasize the characters’ integration with the natural beauty of the rustic island, which seems tucked away in its own time warp.

However, the island is not immune to larger historical forces, and over the next several years Oishi and her students will be forced to grapple with various turmoil and tragedies, both internal and external. In terms of the former, many of the students are constantly struggling against poverty and familial crisis, and some of them have to drop out of school prematurely in order to work and support their families. One poor girl must quit attending school after her father, a sad and possibly abusive alcoholic, loses his wife in childbirth and she must become the de facto mother. Oishi’s responses to these events is gentle and kind as realizes the fundamental reality of impoverished lives even as she mourns the death of another child’s potential to break free from it.

On a larger scale, the island is deeply affected by the growing militarism of Japan during the 1930s and the eventual outbreak of World War II, which claims many young lives as Oishi’s male students join the army and come back as ashes. It is here that the film is at its most daring as Kinoshita uses Oishi’s character to openly criticize the romanticizing of the military and war. In one of the film’s most quietly moving moments, Oishi tells several of her male students that she prefers poor fishermen to soldiers, and for this she is branded a coward. She also gets in trouble with the schoolmaster when she talks about social issues in the classroom, which risks her bring branded a “Red” and arrested, which is an all-too-potent reminder of how free thinking can be turned into a political sin in repressive times.

As good as it is, though, Twenty-Four Eyes may ask for a few hankies too many. Kinoshita keeps the sentiment in check for most of the film, even as he scores the film’s most emotional scenes to Western songs like “Auld Lang Syne” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” but the final third spirals into a series of tragedies--one after another after another--that start to pile up like a train wreck, to the point that it becomes exhausting. However, as a whole the film still works quite beautifully because the first two-thirds had established such an effective emotional charge that it carries through to the almost perfectly bittersweet ending.

Copyright ©2008 James Kendrick

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