The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.6

About this book

Summer is the season of arrivals. At Hoshizaki, it is also the season of departures done properly.

Sumi Takamine spent a summer making the station's form her own, a winter receiving the valley's, and a spring letting other people begin without promised endings. This summer the station asks the last courtesy of her: to let things finish — and to write them down as finished, and thanked. The woman who has lettered the station's summer board by hand for thirty years paints it once more, and signs the corner for the first time. A relief conductor of six years, who has been everybody's substitute and nobody's name, gets a route of her own on the coast — and refuses, politely and completely, to slip away quietly. A taxi that has carried the valley for forty-five years makes its last fare a passenger's ticket. A potter who has kept his whole summer unfired fires the kiln at last. And an old lady who has been told "next summer" forty-one times stops waiting to be farewelled, and gives the farewell herself.

Eight new linked stories, all written for this volume. The cat is nine years old and sits, as ever, where the shade will be. The marigolds are in flower. Nothing at Hoshizaki is undone by finishing — the station's book has a form for it, kept by a stationmaster who has learned to write the words finished, and thanked. About 70,000 words — one station, one summer, eight departures done properly.

The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.6 can be read on its own — and readers of the earlier volumes will find the handover in its third year, the planters in flower from a nursery's saved seed, the Winter Lights in the long cupboard recorded as returned, not finished — and the cat, nine years old, in the shade of the camphor tree, exactly where he was.