The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.24

About this book

In December, a plot of ground at the lower end of the lane is sold — and for one year, the valley's story belongs not to the station but to the house that grows on it.

Twelve linked stories, one for each month of a house's first year, in a small valley in Japan where the trains run at :42 and the station cat keeps the bench. A gardener of thirty-one years asks, aloud, to gather his borrowed ground's last winter crop — and to go on planting the strip beside the new walls. A builder confesses that this is the first house he cannot leave behind. An owner leaves one room undecided, on purpose. A master carpenter, honoured out of the work for a decade, asks for one piece of it back. An owner hears his own roof for the first time, in the rain, alone. A neighbour stops apologising for her house at her own door. A mother praises her son's house outright, or not at all. A landlord takes off his shoes and becomes a guest. A six-year-old promises the fireworks in the house's name. A seller stands, at last, on the ground she sold. A man who has witnessed everyone's thresholds is invited through one, and asked for nothing. And keeper Sumi — who has kept the station through twenty-three volumes — carries a year that was never hers to keep, in the station book, in its own people's names, until the entry the year has earned can be written: become home.

The first train is at 05:42. The last train is at 22:17. The cat, as ever, is on the bench.