The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.12

About this book

In Hoshizaki, the rainy season is not a pause in the year. It is part of the year.

The spring came early, and the valley welcomed it early. Now comes the season with nothing scheduled at all — six weeks of rain. A retired school nurse has put off an overnight visit to her oldest friend for three years, waiting for fine weather. A roofer counts every rain-stopped day as stolen. A laundry has begun apologising to its customers for the sky itself. A widower will not learn his late wife's small arts for keeping a house dry, because learning them feels like agreeing she is gone. A library girl's diary writes rained. nothing. on half the days of her life. The valley's umbrella mender has never mended her own. And the oldest man in the valley has been shelved for sixty years behind one story about one great rain.

And Sumi Takamine, thirty-three, keeper of Hoshizaki station — learning the valley's tenth discipline: to keep a season that asks only to be lived through, not used. Nothing in this book is postponed until the rains end. Everything in it is done in the rain, at the rain's pace, under the rain's roof.

Eight linked stories of one rainy season. The cat, as ever, is on the bench — dry.