The Cat at Platform Zero

About this book

Written in English, set in Japan — a healing story collection in the tradition readers loved in Before the Coffee Gets Cold and We'll Prescribe You a Cat, told from a place no translation has taken you: a station that does not exist, by a cat who does nothing at all.

Hoshizaki Station has one platform, one stationmaster, one vending machine that always runs out of corn soup in winter — and one extra platform across the tracks where no train has stopped for thirty years. Platform Zero. The cat sleeps there.

Eight linked stories. A burned-out office worker takes the first train home after four years of silence. A 78-year-old woman finally answers a letter she waited twenty years to receive. A boy who failed his exams misses the last train on purpose. A pianist who swore he would never play again finds an out-of-tune piano in a waiting room. And the stationmaster — the man who made tea for all of them — receives a letter of his own.

The people who are healed in one story return in the next, as helpers. Nobody is rescued, and nothing is fixed by magic. They are simply met, kindly, at exactly the platform where they stopped.

The Cat at Platform Zero* is the first volume of the Hoshizaki Station Stories. About 70,000 words — one station, eight journeys, and a cat with a brass bell who was there for all of them.