The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.9

About this book

The map of Hoshizaki has changed.

For eleven years the valley's timetable did not change at all. The trains came at forty-two minutes past the hour; the first was the 05:42 and the last the 22:17; and Hoshizaki Station — one platform, one green board, one cat — was the valley's only door. Then, in the middle of March, the company revised the timetable. It took nothing away. But two of the valley's trains now run through the junction and on to the coast, and one stop toward the junction, where a field path ran within living memory, there is a new halt with a name: Nishibashi. Hoshizaki is a station with a neighbour — and this spring, the valley has to learn how to travel under the new map.

A timetable clerk whose memory has expired overnight learns the new line again at ankle height, and writes the supplement no timetable prints. A woman loyal to a longer road — because it passed the people she loves — divides her week between two stations. A girl whose whole journey was stopped by one question she could not ask rides through the junction at last. A boy says not yet to the solo ride the adults scheduled for him, and takes it on an ordinary Tuesday instead. A driver collects a second valley, name by name. And the valley's oldest regular refuses the new halt's opening, for a reason the valley has got entirely wrong — until she reads out, once, in full, the path the halt stands on.

Eight linked stories, all written for this volume. The cat is ten years old and audits the spring from the bench. The station book is still in its thirteenth volume — and this spring it learns to enter its own station neither as the only door nor as a door passed by, but as a station on the line. About 70,000 words — one station, one spring, one map redrawn.

The Cat at Platform Zero Vol.9 can be read on its own — and readers of the earlier volumes will find the winter's keepings all recorded against their new keepers' names, the lights stored as returned, not finished — and the keeping shared, and the forward timetable at Hoshizaki still, as ever, kept in pencil.

Written and produced in Japan by a Japanese author and a Japanese publisher.