The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.16

About this book

In Hoshizaki, the year does not end. It is handed over.

Fifteen volumes have carried the valley through its seasons. This one stands at the hinge of the year itself — the last train of the old year, the bell at midnight, the first train of the new. A woman of fifty-six has written the valley's New Year cards for twenty years, in her beautiful hand, and has never once written her own. A carpenter of seventy-nine begins every year by copying the old calendar into the new one — festivals, orchard days, and a monthly visit to a friend two years dead. A daughter comes home for the New Year as she always has: as the guest, while her family's year-end work is done around her. A boy of nine is determined, this year, to stay awake and witness the exact minute the year turns. The temple bell's hundred and eight strokes have been rung by one man alone for nine years, because he stopped asking. A ward clerk has traded away every year's end for twelve years and told herself she prefers it. And a young man carries the whole valley's first prayers up the hill path every New Year's morning — everyone's but his own.

And Sumi Takamine, thirty-five, keeper of Hoshizaki station — learning the valley's fourteenth discipline: to write the old year's last entry and the new year's first in the same thirteenth book, neither closing the one nor claiming the other, but recording what the valley does through her platform: handed over. Eight linked stories of one year's end, from mid-December to the middle of January. The first train is at 05:42. The last train of the year is at 22:17. The cat, as ever, is on the bench.