The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.14

About this book

In Hoshizaki, the day is not waited for. It is begun — before the station opens, in other hands.

The nights have been kept, in turns. Now the valley turns to the other end of the day. A market opener of forty years has never once walked her own market as a customer. A delivery round built to the minute has no minute in it that belongs to no one. A crossing keeper's whole love language is turning up — and he has never exchanged one word beyond his post. A young harvest hand is carried by other people's mornings. A coastal stall-keeper has ended the town's nights for twenty years without ever seeing a morning arrive. A flower stall is run, mistakes and all, by a dead woman's price card. And a retired postman still eats breakfast alone at half past five, facing the wall clock, at the hour of a job that finished years ago.

And Sumi Takamine, thirty-four, keeper of Hoshizaki station — learning the valley's twelfth discipline: to receive the day as already begun, and to write its beginnings in the book in their keepers' names. Eight linked stories of one autumn of mornings, from the first train of October to the last morning of November. The first train is at 05:42. The market bell is at six. The cat, as ever, was awake before all of them.