The Passengers on the Hankyu Line
A charming collection of Japanese short stories that follow the passengers on a train line with iconic red carriages.
All the stories are from a single ride of the train. Each chapter shows us a snippet of another passenger’s life, and they blend together – a woman who’s the protagonist of one chapter might see another woman boarding the train, and we follow that woman in the next chapter. Then we fast forward to six months later, and see how their lives have changed.
The characters all feel like staples of this sort of short story:
- Tokié, a grandmother who thinks about getting a dog, something her late husband would never have agreed to, and who calls out strangers for antisocial behaviour
- Shoko, a woman whose boyfriend was stolen by a coworker, who curses their wedding but then sheds the trappings of the curse on the journey home
- Etsuko (“Et-chan”), a high-school student with an older boyfriend who’s nervous about having sex for the first time
- Kei’ichi and Miho (“Gon-chan”), two socially awkward university students who find love in each other
It was charming as this sort of story always is, and the trains are obviously a draw for me, but otherwise not especially memorable or remarkable.