Shopkeeping, Yokohama pt. 3

Sorry again for the lapse in posts, gang. I haven't been sleeping well, lately. I've started drinking a little bit of Chicha (a Venezuelan liquor) just before bed and that seems to help. But it gives me weird dreams. I'll go into those later, but I really want to finish the stuff about Japan. So, watashitachi ha tachi saru (Away we go!).

Hortense knew before we arrived that during our stay she would help her grandmother run the family shop. Yokohama Broom Co. located in the famed factory district has been selling and making brooms since 1910. While the rest of the area has been gentrified, cleaned up and modernized so that young artists and families could settle and spend, the broom shop remains frozen in time. Take a look:

(Yokohama Broom Co.)

Hortense couldn't believe it. Ironically, the place could use a good sweeping and there were zero customers the whole day, week, month she worked there. Her grandmother just sat behind the counter, watching a small TV and reading gossip magazines. The back room was filled with old treated straw, dowels of varying sizes and a sewing machine that looked like a liability. After a couple hours of picking up, cleaning and tea, Hortense asked her grandmother if she should go make some more brooms. "When we run out, we'll make more," Yukio told her, without looking up from her variety show. In the days following, Hortense knew to bring a book and her ipod. But that first day was just grueling boredom. She tried asking Yukio about the history of the shop (H.'s mother only mentioned it once or twice), but her grandmother gave the briefest answers, during commercial breaks.

(Yukio's Favortie TV show, Hansamu sûtsu "The Handsome Suit")

The shop was more popular in the first half of the century (obviously) but with the advent of vacuums and Roombas business has been on the wane. Toshi kept telling Yukio to sell the shop, especially as their age and the property value increased. But, Yukio refused to budge; it had been a family business and will remain so until her death. Her master plan is to leave the shop to Hortense, who can sell it if she'd like and keep the immense profit (talk of inheritance makes H. and I anxious, her grandparents are more prepared for their deaths than either of us).

H. asked her grandmother if anyone even came into the shop. "Gangsters," Yukio said. "They come in asking if I want to be in business with them. They want to use the shop as a front. But I tell them I want no dealings with Yakuza. Different mob families offer me millions but I want clean hands when I die." Hortense was gobsmacked. Immediately, she wanted to close the shop and sell it off. She couldn't bear the thought of this elderly, frail woman dealing with thugs. "Let's leave, call the police, sell the shop, relocate, too, I bet they know where you live." H. was a hummingbird flitting around a tortoise. But Yukio kept watching TV and told her not to worry. Her stillness did nothing to calm H. Who knows if any of it was true. Yukio suffers from dementia and it's been getting worse. She asks Hortense at least ten times a day who the round eye is staying at their house. Sometimes, she calls Toshi Mr. Yamata and asks how his ferns are doing.

At dinner that night, Hortense alarmingly relayed the days events, hoping that Toshi would convince his wife to close the store for good. "Everything else may go," he smiled, "but she'll still wake up every morning with the desire to get to the store." Hortense avoided another blowup and just stomped upstairs. I was again left in awkward silence with her increasingly senile grandparents.