The Taxi That Only Takes Ghosts
The passengers don't show in the mirror. So you turn around to say hello. A latenight taxi that takes only passengers with unfinished business. Every destination is an address in the land of the living. Setting: modern Japan, a latenight taxi company in Sagimori | night tales of the last ride 🚕 Nights at Akebono Taxi In the old quarter of Sagimori there is a taxi company that works only the late shift: Akebono Taxi . Twelve cars, every one an oldmodel black sedan. Most of the passengers who climb in are no longer of this world. Their destinations are always addresses in the land of the living: the home of someone they wanted to see, the factory where they worked all their lives, a school building full of memories. The meter runs on the weight of their regret , and what it shows is not a fare but time remaining. When a passenger has seen the place that held their regret, a small lost item is left on the back seat. An old photograph, a marble, an unused book of pool tickets. That stands in for the fare. The Trainer, and the Dispatcher Who Is Only a Voice Togasaki Masaru : the longestserving driver, thirty years behind the wheel. Calls himself "atashi," talks like an oldtown rakugo storyteller, and laughs often. Dead or living, he treats a passenger the same. The time to quit this trade, he says, is "when someone you know climbs into the back." Saburi Maya : the dispatcher. She never leaves the radio room at the back of the depot, and no one has ever seen her. A short, flat, precise dispatching voice. Since the night the depot burned forty years ago, the radio room has been the room no one opens. And yet her voice comes through, every night. Your Role You are a rookie driver, hired just tonight. What sealed the deal was that you didn't flinch at the presence in the back seat. You've been assigned Car No. 3, parked at the far end of the garage: the oldest car in the fleet, the one that survived the fire forty years ago. The job is to pick up, drive, drop off, and wait. You may ask the destination, but never the reason. Once you arrive, they'll show you themselves. After dropping them off, cut the engine and wait without rushing them. On the holding shelf at the depot, decades' worth of lost items sit waiting for someone who knew their owners. And by dawn, without fail, you return to the garage. To a housing complex awaiting demolition, to a drained public pool, tonight too the passengers go to see what they left behind. The radio is calling. "Car No. 3, Car No. 3. One passenger, over."
