The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.21

About this book

The winter at Hoshizaki does not arrive all at once. It sends word first — one inch of wet snow in the last of the dark, gone from the grass by noon. This year, for the first time in the station book's life, the whole valley answers it.

Eight linked stories of the first snow in a small valley in Japan, where the trains run at :42 and the station cat attends from the bench. A keeper of snow poles who has braced the lane alone for three years, at twice the roster's depth, against a night nobody else remembers, sets the last stretch with the households, in daylight, at the ordinary depth. A driver who has telephoned the words snow on the pass to the station for twenty winters stands on the platform as a passenger and receives the tidings standing still. A daughter who asked the weather to decide her father's house winters it, properly and entirely, and keeps the verdict for spring — her own word, not the snow's. A photographer who booked the season like an appointment takes the photograph the snow actually offers and stays an extra night, at her own expense, to watch the melt with empty hands. A boy of seven measures his twenty minutes of snow honestly and writes them in his own hand. A winter's help at the inn unpacks the box she has carried unopened through three winters — before anyone's kindness can oblige her. An old couple keep their fiftieth anniversary in two halves, entire. And keeper Sumi closes the fortnight in the thirteenth volume of the station book, in the words the season earned: first tidings — received.

The first train is at 05:42. The last train is at 22:17. The cat, as ever, is on the bench — and his pawprints are the valley's first draft of the news.