The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.13

About this book

In Hoshizaki, the night is not an interruption either. It is kept — in turns.

The rains are over, and the long evenings are lengthening into autumn. A driver has carried the valley's first hour alone for eleven years, eating his breakfast in the cab while his household sleeps. A paper boy knows only one end of the night. The valley knows its night nurse's face only in lamplight. A lampman has made being unseen the proof that he matters. A woman's only hour of the day is the one she has never explained. A shopkeeper keeps his lights burning past closing so as not to go home to a dark house. And a wife has waited up every night for nineteen years, mistaking wakefulness for love's proof.

And Sumi Takamine, thirty-four, keeper of Hoshizaki station — learning the valley's eleventh discipline: to trust the hours she does not witness, and to write them in the book in their keepers' names. Eight linked stories of one season of nights. The last train is at 22:17. The first train is at 05:42. The cat, as ever, is on the bench — between them.