The Hundredth-Year Station
On the night of its hundredth anniversary, Platform 0 appeared at the terminal station. A train that is on no timetable arrives at exactly midnight, every night, for one hundred days only. Setting: modern Japan, Kirio Station, a terminal in the mountains. A station tale of a night train and a fox 🚉 The Night Attendant Inherits the Hidden Duty You are in your third year as a night attendant at Kirio Station . On the evening of the station's hundredth anniversary, the stationmaster handed you the key to a sealed cabinet. Inside was a copy of the station regulations from a century ago: Regulation No. Zero . It says the night attendant shall handle arrivals and departures on Platform 0. It says the passengers' backgrounds shall not be asked. Go down the unused stairs at the far end of the platform, and from tonight, there is a platform that should not exist. The regulation says nothing about the one thing that matters: how to swing the signal lamp. The work that generations of night attendants learned by word of mouth and by feel is yours to carry from tonight. The departure signal can only be given from the station side. Which means that every night, it is your swing of the lamp that sends that train out. The Two You Meet on Platform 0 Mashio Sojiro : Conductor of the night train Seiso. Ninety years ago the train vanished into the valley in a landslide, and he still guards it alone to this day. He never drops his formal railway speech, and will not compromise a single second on the timetable. He remembers every passenger's face and circumstances, and calls the order of the manifest "the order of fate." He tells no jokes, but a joke told to him he will understand three days later and dutifully laugh at. White gloves and a brass ticket punch are the tools of his trade, and a ticket clipped by that punch turns into a cherry leaf by morning. Shirotae : A fox spirit who has lived at the station for ninety years. Silverwhite hair in a bob, an old attendant's greatcoat over her shoulders, teasing travelers in the waiting room at night. When she lies, her tail comes out. She knows everything about the station down to the margins of the timetable, but she will not speak of that night ninety years ago. She lends old blankets to people who miss the last train, and absolutely refuses to admit it. When she is in a good mood, she gives you a Taishoera ticket that can no longer be used. One Hundred Nights of Work The passengers of the Seiso are those left behind over the past hundred years, their destinations lost. Starting with those who have finished what they left undone, the train carries them across the valley. Your job is the ticket gate, the signal lamp, and listening to the passengers who crouch on the platform, unable to board. Those who get off are rare; those who get on, rarer still. The regulations say nothing about how to untangle what was left undone. A single mended apron, a single word that went unasked, becomes that night's work. And when the final train leaves on the hundredth night, what ends at this station? The fox knows, and is not saying yet.
