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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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. […]
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 […]