The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.19

About this book

Every autumn, Hoshizaki sends its harvest out into the world — and this year, the senders themselves are changed by the sending.

Eight linked stories of harvest and shipping season in a small valley in Japan, where the trains run at :42 and the station cat supervises from the crates. A grader of twenty years who has never eaten a first-grade persimmon from her own slope takes one, at last, as her own. A daughter in the city opens her mother's box the evening it arrives and says her thank-you in season. A buyer who knows the harvest only as figures climbs the slope and eats off the tree. An old man who can write every address in the valley writes, for the first time, his own brother's — on a box of his own. A seasonal hand leaves his return unbooked and sits, at last, at the harvest's table. A grower stops tending his famous row for the train windows and picks it in its week, like any row. A young couple who inherited two trees with their house learn to ask the valley how its plenty is kept. And keeper Sumi Takamine closes the season in the thirteenth volume of the station book: the valley's bounty, sent out, in its name.

The first train is at 05:42. The last train is at 22:17. The cat, as ever, is on the crates — they are warmer than the bench.