The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.15

About this book

In Hoshizaki, the day is not only begun in other hands. It is brought home.

The mornings were received as already begun. Now the valley follows the same day to its other end — the dusk, the homebound trains, the lit windows going down the valley in the dark. A man of forty-seven has been welcomed through his own door for twenty years and never once stood on its other side. A child of eight has stopped beginning anything, because the dusk takes everything unfinished. A daughter's coming home has been replaced, minute for minute, by a telephone call at half past five. A married couple's homecomings pass each other like trains on a single line. A woman knows the whole valley by what it leaves behind in the evening carriages — and will not let the valley know her the same way. An old man has never once chosen the end of his own day. And a schoolboy has loaded his whole week onto one Friday train.

And Sumi Takamine, thirty-four, keeper of Hoshizaki station — learning the valley's thirteenth discipline: to receive the day back, and to write its homecoming in the book as what it is. Eight linked stories of one winter of dusks, from the first dark evening of December to the last day of January. The first train is at 05:42. The last light is earlier than you think. The cat, as ever, is watching the windows come home.