The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.23

About this book

On the Saturday in the middle of October, the rain comes to Hoshizaki before the first train and stays until after the last one — and the waiting room that stood empty at the day's height all spring fills in the morning and stays full until the lamps.

Eight linked stories of one rainy day in a small valley in Japan, where the trains run at :42 and the station cat holds the warm centre of the room. A vending-machine serviceman of nineteen years sits down in a waiting room for the first time in his working life. A widow under the valley's broadest eaves opens her unready house to the market crowd. A hairdresser who has cut everyone's hair but her own books herself, out loud, into the other chair. A health visitor who never sits in a client's house makes her rounds on foot — and sits. A boy's secret waiting at a leaking halt shelter is told, and thanked, at last. A violinist plays a hummed lullaby twice in a held train's hour, the second time slower. A son's monthly hour between two trains widens, by his own hand, into a supper. And keeper Sumi, who has recorded the valley's middays and its first snows, writes up the fullest day of her keeping — not by its weather, but by its company.

The first train is at 05:42. The last train is at 22:17. The cat, as ever, is on the bench — dry, in the warm room, under one roof with everyone.