The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.5

About this book

Spring is the season of arrivals. At Hoshizaki, it is also the season of trying.

Sumi Takamine made her own form in the summer and learned, over one winter, to receive the valley's. Spring asks the hardest thing of a keeper: to let other people begin — in public, without a promised ending. A nursery assistant sows her grandfather's five-year-old marigold seed in the station planter, ten seeds, expecting some, and declines to count what comes up. A courier who has pushed his perfect bicycle all winter measures out a hundred metres of platform at dawn. A retired teacher whose alto voice has changed does not sing — she hums, in the middle part, where it holds a room apart so everything in it can be pretty. A language assistant with flawless, useless Japanese files her beautiful speech and addresses the hall like a bakery counter. A son audits his father's orchard for the last time and is entered in the book as tea. A boy crosses a bridge in sections, until the sections join up into his mornings. And a signalman buys a stamp for a letter he wrote nineteen years ago.

Eight new linked stories, all written for this volume. The cat turns nine this spring. The lights are stored, not finished. Nothing at Hoshizaki is promised an ending — a sprout, a reply, a far bank — and the station, which has strong views about promises, considers this the kindest arrangement of all. About 70,000 words — one station, one spring, eight beginnings.

The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.5 can be read on its own — and readers of the earlier volumes will find the handover in its second year, the corn-soup machine honourably stood down until winter, the Winter Lights in the long cupboard recorded as returned, not finished — and the cat, nine years old, greyer at the muzzle in a manner the spring light has made considerably more distinguished, exactly where he was.