By Jiro Asada
Viz Media, 237 pages

In what amounts to an afterword, author Jiro Asada says the original catchphrase for The Stationmaster was “Miracles so simple, they could happen to you.” Eight short stories sharing the same motif of miracles could get repetitive, but luckily, while there are certain character types and themes Asada frequently returns to, each tale is different enough that it never seems like the same trick twice.

The titular story revolves around a dying railroad line and the watchman who has dedicated his life to it. Otomatsu, about to lose what has given him meaning for so long, reflects on what the job has cost him—most tragically, his infant daughter. However, during what might be the last New Year’s Eve for the station, Otomatsu is visited by a young girl who resembles the child he lost, who provides him some joy in his darkening hours.

Is the mysterious visitor a ghost or just a figment of the main character’s imagination? For me it didn’t really matter. Admittedly, I am not the biggest fan of New Age-style narratives, and if all eight of Asada’s stories were like that, I might have found The Stationmaster intolerable. But not all the “miracles” involve bending rules of time and reality; some feature characters undergoing internal changes as the result of non-spiritual events. These are exactly the kind of miracles that happen every day, which makes the aforementioned tagline—to me, anyway—seem like a cop-out.

In “Love Letter,” a longtime yakuza hood turns his life around thanks to a woman he never meets, while in “Invitation from the Orion Cinema,” a couple rediscovers their romantic feelings when revisiting their hometown. These are two very different short stories, linked only through the supposedly “miraculous” event they share. But looking at the volume as a whole, what really seems like a recurring theme is how anguish surfaces in the face of uncertainty: staring into the proverbial abyss, Asada’s protagonists find themselves meditating on mistakes they made, traumas that went unresolved.

Throughout The Stationmaster, Asada’s abilities as an author show in the different tones he adopts. The titular story starts off with a lengthy dialogue between two characters, neither of whom is the central protagonist, but gradually takes on an almost fairy tale quality (“That day in Horomai the snow blew so hard both time and place were completely obscured. The old station building was buried in pure white, no sound, no light.”). “Devil,” on the other hand, shifts perspectives from third-person to first, and its tale of a wealthy family’s disintegration is pared down to the most vivid and horrifying scenes; this way, the sense of tension rarely lets up.

Overall, Asada’s text is frequently arresting; at the same time, it can be funny in a dry sort of way. For example, in “Invitation from the Orion Cinema,” the main characters—an estranged couple—rehearse a cover story for why they are living apart, so they don’t have to say they have separated. The wife, Yoshie, repeats the story at some point, but she tells it nearly verbatim, and it sounds awfully mechanical. It’s funny when she does this, but what’s also humorous is how the listener reacts—he doesn’t really care. That this gets the couple to stop dwelling on their own past and start living in the present fits into the argument that “miracles” don’t have to be out-of-this-world events. Rather, they can be as simple as realizing regrets aren’t worth holding onto.

The Stationmaster is available now.