"Shimatta,” Miwa hissed, propping Sayuri’s ragdoll-like body up on a bench. The train attendant glanced up to make sure Kohei didn’t see the mischief taking placed on the platform. Luckily, he was too busy speaking into his walkie-talkie. It was probably the nightshift overseer relaying a delay. Only a matter of time before Kohei came over to tell Miwa.

The woman wasn’t injured, but that was damn close. The next train may have been over ten minutes away, but Miwa would have had to call it in, hit the emergency button, get Kohei to help her pull the young woman out of the tracks, and then wait around for the authorities and medical personnel to take care of her. Meanwhile, people trying to get home before 1 AM were fucked, and they would take it out on the train line, which would trickle down to the humble train station attendants.

“Daijyoubu desu ka?” Miwa lightly patted the woman’s face, whose chin rested against her chest. Faint puffs of breath shot out of her nostrils. “Ogyakusama? Dajyoubu desu ka? Do you need medical help?”

The woman muttered something incoherent. Miwa was so close to calling it in that she had her hand on the walkie-talkie.

“Hey. What’s happening here?” Kohei appeared behind the bench. “Is she okay?”

“I think so. She must be drunk.”

Kohei sniffed. “I don’t smell any alcohol.”

“Maybe she’s sick.”

“Better call it in. Make sure she doesn’t get near the tracks.”

Miwa sighed. “You got things taken care of here?”

“Get her up the escalator and to the office. Oda-san will take it from there. You should be back in five minutes before the next train comes.”

Easier said than done. Kohei should have taken care of the female passenger. Miwa hated to think it, but he was stronger and sturdier if it came down to dealing with a dead-weight adult.

But Miwa knew what this was about. Passengers didn’t want to step off a train to only see a woman manning the platform. What would that say about the company?

Fuck this. Miwa slung the woman’s arm around her shoulders and helped her stand up. A harried sound gurgled up her throat. She was alive, at least. “Let’s go, ma’am. You let me know if you’re going to fall, okay?”

The passenger didn’t respond.

Shinosuke Oda was on duty at the ticket gates. He took one look at the mess coming up the escalator and motioned for the overseer in the back to come forward. They had already conferred among themselves by the time Miwa approached the gates with her half-fainted passenger.

“Honda-san radioed us about the situation.” Shinosuke came out of the ticket booth to help Miwa bring the woman into the back room. “We’ll look after her and figure things out from here. Try to figure out if she has family or at least where she’s going, I guess.”

Miwa bowed in appreciation. “I must get back to the platform.”

“Ah, yes, the 00:35 is due at any moment. You better go and back up Honda-san.”

Miwa would do that. She would finish the last half hour of her shift and find out what the hell happened to the passenger.

After the final train of the night left the station and nobody was left on the platform, Miwa and Kohei headed up the defunct escalators. Shinosuke was doing his end-of-shift paperwork in the ticket booth. The gates were shut and the overhead tickers dark for the night. All it took was one switch of Kohei’s hand, and the connection to half the lights in the station went off. The only bright lights left were in the stairwells to the street and in the back office.

“Otsukaresama desu!” Four voices echoed at once in the little office. Overseer Wataru Endo went back to his phone call, speaking a hushed but reverent tone. Either he spoke to his higher ups… or someone from a hospital.

Indeed, the young woman from the platform lay across the loveseat crammed into the corner of the office. It was usually reserved for these unfortunate occasions, although the little kids, pregnant women, and heat exhaustion victims who most often occupied the “sick sofa” in the office were conscious and at least able to answer simple questions like, “Who are you?” and “Who can we call for you?”

“Ban-san,” Shinosuke said as soon as Miwa approached her locker. “We need you to please try to find this woman’s identification.”

It took her a moment to figure out why she had to do it. Right. She was a woman. When in doubt, ask a woman to touch the other, unconscious woman.

“Right away.” Miwa, sore and sleepy from her shift, bent down next to the sofa and gingerly searched the woman’s coat and skirt pockets. She didn’t have a purse.

She didn’t have any kind of identification. It must have been in her purse, wherever it was.

But she did have her phone in her jacket pocket. A dark pink Softbank flip-phone that flashed because of a missed call. A Sailor Moon charm clanked against the plastic case when Miwa stood up, phone in her hand.

Endo hung up with a mighty sigh. “Find anything over there, Ban-san?”

“Just her phone. She must have lost her purse.”

“Youshi, Honda-san.” Kohei perked up to hear his name. “Please do one last sweep of the platform for this woman’s purse.”

“Hai.” Miwa recognized a flicker of annoyance in her coworker’s eyes. He also wanted to get home, not look for more missing items.

“I just spoke with the nearby hospital,” Endo said. “They’ll send a bus over if we can’t get a hold of her family. But they can’t do much without an ID. The police will have to be notified as well.”

“What a bother,” Shinnosuke muttered. “At the end of the shift, too.”

Miwa held up the phone. She couldn’t get past the lock screen, but that number flashed every time she hit the power button. “We could try calling this number. Maybe it’s a family member looking for her.”

“I’ll leave it to you, Ban-san.” Endo gestured to the office phone. “I’m going to look into something else.”

Miwa didn’t have any choice but to sit down at the overseer’s desk and pick up the phone. She dialed out and punched in the number she had almost already memorized. All the while she kept one eye on the woman slowly tossing and turning on the sofa, as if asleep.

The phone rang three times before a groggy voice picked up.

“Moshi moshi? Is that you, Sayu?”

Sayu? Miwa briefly looked away from the woman. “I’m so sorry to bother you this late at night, ma’am,” she began, “but this is Miwa Ban from the Amaya-jinja-guchi Station calling because we have a passed out passenger under our care, and we’re trying to find her family.”

The other woman was silent for a few seconds. “Are you kidding me? Che. Passed out! Is she drunk?”

“Are you related to the owner of this phone, ma’am?”

“Not anymore, I’m not.” The other woman said that much too quickly. She followed it up with, “I’m sorry. I guess I’m the closest thing to next of kin she has right now. Where are you, again?”

“Amaya-jinja-guchi Station.”

“Ara! Is that in Tokyo? You really must be kidding!”

It took a few more minutes to convince the woman to do something about the passenger named Sayuri Kawashima. She was reluctant to get too involved, and based on the couched answers she fed Miwa, all one could conclude was that she was an ex-relative of some kind. Perhaps an ex-friend.

Miwa shook her head when she hung up. By then, her boss was back and looking for answers.

“That was some distant relative of hers,” was all Miwa could think to say. “She gave me some identification info for us to forward to the hospital.”

“Let’s call them and get this taken care of, then.”

Within half an hour, an ambulance arrived to drive Ms. Kawashima to the nearest hospital. The two EMTs loaded the woman onto a stretcher and expertly wheeled her up the stairs and onto the street, where the ambulance waited.

“Jya, let’s all go home, shall we?”

The incident had been recorded and everything taken care of on their end. Miwa only needed to change into her street clothes and head up to her bike chained behind the station. Her coworkers bade her goodnight as they either walked home or hopped into their cars.

But Miwa wasn’t in a hurry to hop on her bike and start the twenty-minute ride home. Her mind was on the mysterious woman who had no identity and no diagnosis until a random woman was called.

She was going to jump… Even if the woman had not been entirely of sound-mind – and what jumper was, really – she was still going to jump and end her life.

Miwa sat on her bike, bag jammed into the basket in front of her, and shed a few sympathy tears before proceeding home – and continuing to think about that woman for the rest of the week.