The God at the Station

Stories

## Illustrations

## Preface

Taiwan edition. Transcribed from Light Novel Kingdom.

There is a god inside Tsubamemachi Station.

The rumor began to spread just as 2015 got underway.

A short feature on a news site was what set it loose.

In this age, information travels, quite literally, a thousand miles. Once sites devoted to gathering the reports appeared, the “god’s” blog climbed to hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of days.

But what spreads in an instant is also what people tire of at once. That is the character of information now.

Aside from a handful of fans who bookmarked the site, most people cannot even remember that such an article ever existed.

What remains is only a rumor still wrapped in a veil of mystery, something like an urban legend.

There is a god inside Tsubamemachi Station.

## Chapter One: A Back Turned Away

In the afternoon, snow like cotton fluff kept drifting down from the sky. Inside Tsubamemachi Station, though, the heat of the crowd still filled the air, thick enough to feel stifling.

“At present, train overhead lines have been disrupted by today’s snowfall. All lines for which Tsubamemachi Station is the first or last stop are temporarily suspended according to conditions. We apologize for the inconvenience to our passengers and ask for your understanding.”

Ryoichi Sakuraba, hunched inside his balmacaan, tapped his IC card at the ticket gate and hurried through. At the announcement from the station attendant standing on the footstool, he lifted a tired face in spite of himself.

The trains had stopped? At this hour?

He had been sleeping at the office for days on end because of overtime, and he had not been home in three. Looks like I’ll have to spend the money and upgrade to a Green Car— the thought had barely formed.

Announcements of the same wording came over the speakers everywhere.

Tsubamemachi Station, in Tsubame Ward, Tokyo, connects at its south exit to the subway and at its north exit to the limited express, and it is also one of the busiest terminal stations in the capital region, with hundreds of thousands of people passing through every day. Plenty of people get on and off here for reasons other than a transfer. There are a good number of office buildings around the station. The broad concourse built to hold all those passengers was now packed solid with office workers who could not get home.

Sakuraba, one of them, loosened a collar gone wrinkled in the heat of the crowd, and…

## Chapter Two: A Gaze

She’s looking again.

Natsumi Hayashi lifted pot after pot of nemophila in both hands, busy with opening preparations, and stole a glance toward Maple Plaza.

Inside the “in-station mall” of Tsubamemachi Station stands a tall maple. Benches ring the tree, and pale green buds have already appeared at the tips of its branches. Sit on a bench the same brick red as the escalators, and you can take in the whole of the hexagonal mall at a glance.

That soaring maple is an important piece of stage dressing, enough to make a person forget they are inside a station. The fact of a great tree indoors surprises a lot of people. The mall sits above the tracks, so beneath a single floor trains are always running. From the problem of how the roots would grow, to pruning the branches and clearing fallen leaves, the station staff worked together and solved each thing in turn. Only then did the place become what it is today.

Their labor was worth it. The benches in Maple Plaza are popular. At any hour, someone is sitting with their back to the maple, taking in the view of the mall.

And today, since early morning, a tall girl had been sitting there the whole time. She looked as if she were playing with her phone. In truth she had been watching the flower shop beside the plaza, Blue Blossom.

No. What she was watching was not the shop itself. It was one of the clerks, a girl named Natsumi Hayashi.

A week had already passed since Natsumi noticed that gaze. It was not the look of a man with bad intentions. It was full of hostility, sharp enough to pierce the nape of the neck…

## Chapter Three: A Lie

“Hey—anything unusual today?”

Shigeri Kinuno, on the late shift, stepped into the security office beside the staff-only gate.

Ryogo Morishita was no good at dealing with this old man. First, the man was soaked in cigarette smell. Second, the body odor that had come with age was heavy. Whether he was posted at a fixed point or out on patrol, he always wore a broad grin. But if it were only those traits, Morishita would not have found him so hard to handle.

“No. Nothing in particular.”

“What’s with that? You’re too cold—come on, get the corners of your mouth up. That sour face of yours is going to drag the other staff down with it.”

“…You talk too much…”

He answered on purpose at a volume Kinuno could hear, but the man pretended not to, and only stared at the monitor.

It was exactly this about Kinuno that Morishita could not deal with. He had heard the man had been in security for twenty years, and in front of Morishita and the other colleagues he always put on the airs of a senior. Morishita did not see what there was to be proud of. It was only twenty years of getting by on part-time work.

While inwardly recoiling from the cigarette smell Kinuno carried, Morishita greeted the vendors and employees coming in and out of the station. He had to confirm that, when they passed the staff-only gate, they actually took out an IC card and tapped it, or else check their passes. The first of those especially. Every day one or two people forgot to tap, so he had to watch closely. If even one person went through the gate without tapping…

## Chapter Four: Recollection

Stepping down from the train of white steel, a wave of dizziness rose with her.

The carriage, air-conditioning turned too high, and the concrete platform left under the blaze of high summer. Startled by the sharp difference in temperature between the two, Kaoruko Sannami set an unsteady foot on the platform. In the next moment, passengers hurrying to get off pushed from behind, and she nearly lost her balance.

If she had known it would be like this, she should not have been so vain as to put on this black dress, unworn for years. The shoes, too. Better the usual flats than the heels on her feet.

When she finally reached the foot of the stairs up to the station concourse, Sannami held the rail and watched the people beside her hurry upward, their footsteps loud.

“…Young people really do have energy.”

Past sixty, her body no longer moved as it once had, and little by little she had given up the idea of going far from home. Worn by the heat until she could not take another step, Sannami sat down on the stairs and waited for the crowd to thin.

She knew the young station attendant on the platform had glanced her way. Older people are more sensitive to the eyes of others than the young imagine. What does it matter? Let me rest a moment. She murmured it inwardly, then let out a sigh.

Last night she had hardly slept at all. The dizziness from a moment ago, and a packed train for the first time in she did not know how many years, and the tiredness pulled her under before she knew it.

“Ma’am. Ma’am. Are you all right?”

An unfamiliar man’s voice brought Sannami fuzzily awake.

…

## Chapter Five: Station Sketches

November 7.

To mark the tenth anniversary of the “in-station mall,”

this station will hold a solo exhibition by “the god of Tsubamemachi Station.”

More than three hundred pictures made with this station as their subject.

For these ten years he has quietly watched

Tsubamemachi Station and the “in-station mall,”

and here he will show

the path of his own work.

For the run of the exhibition,

the whole of the “in-station mall” is the gallery.

The story of these ten years in the mall

will become illustrations in every color,

dressing every wall here,

and every pillar.

Against Nakagami’s illustrations, lettering of a kind that settles the heart formed a few lines of promotional copy.

Nakagami, seated on a bench in Maple Plaza, was looking at a flyer folded in four.

The corner of his mouth held a smile that seemed already to have given up.

The station attendant’s announcement came from the concourse of Tsubamemachi Station.

“Today, with a strong typhoon approaching, trains at this station will run on a reduced schedule. From this afternoon until tomorrow morning, significant delays are expected, and a number of trains may be suspended—”

What rotten luck. Why did it have to be today? Nakagami thought it, and lifted his head to look at the people stepping into the mall. There was not a hand among them without an umbrella.

Then a feeling rose in him all at once.

“But I’m not lying.”

His father’s startled reaction left Nakagami a little proud. He was already thirty, and what came over him then was a thought like a child’s.

On a Friday night, people usually…

## Afterword

When I was still in elementary school, there was a notice board at the station near my house.

The city I lived in then had no station of its own. The nearest one was a fifteen-minute bus ride from home. For me, a train was something you used when you were “going to another prefecture.” Even so, there was a shop that sold only video games near the station, and a shopping center with a hamburger place, so I went fairly often.

When my grandparents or other relatives came to visit, the whole family would go to the station to meet them.

Coming home from the New Year shrine visit, the moment I arrived at that station I always had the feeling that I was finally back.

On the station notice board there were often postings that read “Lost and found: commuter pass, Mr./Ms. So-and-so.” Every time I saw one, for some reason, I smiled.

After I grew up and began living on my own, I almost never got off at that station anymore.

Even now, though, somewhere inside I still take it for “our station.”

Where is the station that belongs to you?

If you can read this book while thinking about that question, it would be a great honor for me.

The thanks follow.

Editor Kurosaki. You looked after this work in so many ways as well.

Everyone who helped me with the research. I learned a great deal from the experience.

While writing, I consulted all kinds of sources. My thanks to the authors of those materials.

And to everyone who gathers at the station. You gave me the ground this story stands on.

Thank you, all of you.