Forty Desks on Okishima
by Lorvoker
Drama
Junior education-ministry auditor Hiroshi Nakagawa arrives from Osaka with a single ironed shirt and finds that the one-room school on the small Japanese island of Okishima has reported forty pupils for twelve years while teaching exactly three, and that the phantom funding keeps the ferry running, the clinic open and its eighty-year-old headmistress in her classroom. With five days until his report is due at the close of the fiscal year, and the islanders politely adopting him, he must file the true numbers, quietly bend them, or try to fill those empty desks for real before anyone checks.