The title piece is a novella-length exercise in dreamlike frission, with a man rushing to board a departing train. A sympathetic conductor helps him aboard, which binds the two. The conductor, a lovesick sad sack, leads the protagonist into a succession of increasingly odd encounters with several highly eccentric individuals onboard the train, in time for a hopeful and redemptive finale.

     Another of the stories, “The Square,” achieves an equivalent level of imaginative bizarrie. It consists of a triple-pronged narrative presented in four chapters. Each chapter finds the three workaholic protagonists, all unaware of the others’ existence, undergoing similar experiences involving the discovery of some literary or audiovisual device that draws them out of their mundane lives and into the town square, where a certain ecstatic transcendence is in store.

     A further standout is “The Teashop,” which like “Compartments” involves a fateful train ride. In this case, though, the protagonist, an inquisitive young woman, begins the tale by disembarking from a train. She enters a teashop and, upon ordering a “Tea Made of Stories,” gets quite an earful.