The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.7

About this book

Autumn is the season of returns. At Hoshizaki, nothing comes back as what it was — and the station would not have it any other way.

Sumi Takamine spent a summer learning to let things finish, and to write them down as finished, and thanked. This autumn the valley tests the other half of her keeping: what to do with everything that comes back. A daughter returns to her mother's closed bookshop with a stock book and a pencil, determined to finish her grief into inventory — and leaves one shelf exactly as she found it. A retired farmer returns to his own old row every morning of the harvest, shears in hand, and has to learn to sit at his own table as a guest. A tour guide with a pouch full of return tickets she has never once used lets one of them expire, on purpose, standing on the platform. A painter who has been faithful to a view for forty years paints, at last, the view that is actually there. The summer's departures return too — as visitors, as a conductor passing through on her own road, as a poster come back in print — changed, and received at their true size.

Eight new linked stories, all written for this volume. The cat is nine years old and audits the season from the last warm square of the waiting-room floor. The persimmons are harvested. The marigold seed is gathered in labelled envelopes for a spring nobody has promised anything to. About 75,000 words — one station, one autumn, eight returns received as they are.

The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.7 can be read on its own — and readers of the earlier volumes will find the departures of the summer kept exactly as they were written, the Winter Lights still in the long cupboard recorded as returned, not finished — and the cat, nine years old, in the low autumn sun, exactly where he was.