Bean bag
My sister and I went on furniture shopping for the new apartment. My sister’s boyfriend, Nobu, came along. Furniture shopping was done on my sister’s terms. I was picturing a […]
Moving in with sister
In the second year in Tokyo, I moved in with my sister. My friend, who knew of our rocky relationship, was baffled by my decision. A few months before the […]
Study of machismo
While women’s promiscuity relegates them to the bad girl position, that of men’s enhances their machismo. The epithet given to the former is “slut,” while to the latter, it is […]
Hostesses
The more misogynistic the society is, the more polarized the dichotomy of good girls and bad girls. The misogyny puts women in their places of good and bad so that […]
Miso soup – pizza complex
Back home, the only men I knew after leaving junior high school were my father, grandfather, uncles, and teachers, with whom I barely talked. Now I spoke to men at […]
Not a romance
Most customers came to see mama, and they had known her for many years. Mama set certain boundaries with them. She’d ban them from Kubo if they misbehaved or made […]
Bad customers
Not all customers were pleasant, of course. There was a solo customer of about 60 years old who would throw obscene words at us and took delight in seeing our […]
The Matsuokas
The Matsuokas was a father and a son. The father single-handedly built a business of manufacturing and distributing construction machinery. His son first worked for a different company to gain […]
Good customers
There were customers I liked because they treated me as a human being. The engineers from a mid-size IT company came with their CEO, who was once an engineer himself. […]
Customers of Kubo
Besides mama, there were 5 or 6 staff worked in rotation. One of them was a boy, Hiro, also a college student, and was a relative of mama. He mostly […]