Thirteenth Step

The staircase at his transfer station has twelve steps. On rainy days, if he counts, it has thirteen.Beyond the thirteenth step lies Platform 0, where a silver train waits to carry him to the lives he did not live: the life where he married Mio and runs a jazz bar with her in Tokyo; the life where he followed her to Melbourne and she keeps a Japanese bookshop in a laneway. Each journey shows him, in luminous detail, the road not taken.But every return ticket has a price — a memory of someone from his real life, chosen not by him but by Moriya, the elderly station attendant who punches his ticket. A friend's face. A piano teacher's last words. One whole person at a time, his past is quietly thinning out.Then he meets Mio in his real life — a librarian who should be a stranger, yet somehow knows his name — and learns that he is not the only one who has been riding the trains. And that two lives cannot both stay thick forever.A quiet, luminous novella of magical realism about regret, memory, and the lives we did not choose. For readers of Haruki Murakami and Toshikazu Kawaguchi's Before the Coffee Gets Cold. Translated from the Japanese.