The Station Worker’s Diary

At eighteen, Fujioka works at Meguro Station, his uniform ingrained with grease and his hopes of schooling apparently extinguished. The handsome student who passes through the station seems to possess everything he lacks. A young woman’s smallest glance becomes an occasion for longing, shame, and jealousy.

As seasons turn, kindness from the stationmaster opens a different path. A Christian teacher and a remarkable labor organizer challenge Fujioka’s contempt for his own work. Around him, railway construction brings exhausting labor, solidarity, and a death that makes poverty painfully immediate.

Private resentment and social awakening develop together, without an easy separation. Even as Fujioka prepares to leave Tokyo for union work in Kyushu, an unexpected marriage draws the threads of his troubled past into his future.