“When I first met him he was drinking a soda, so I totally thought he didn’t drink alcohol…”

You can almost hear the wife’s sigh through the diary’s pages. It tells the story of a married couple who ran a furniture store in Nishiura.

Before meeting his wife, the husband had gone to Tokyo to pursue medicine. Although he immediately took to his newfound freedom and indulged in the profligate pleasures thereof, it would prove problematic for his health. He eventually transferred to a commercial school in Numazu. After graduating, he tried and failed to find work in Yokohama and Osaka while shouldering the debts incurred by his father’s kimono fabric shop, “Daiboshi Kimono”.

He married his wife - the one who penned that exasperated line earlier - through a formal interview. She’d decided to marry him as long as he didn’t drink alcohol, but ended up together with a remarkable libertine.
At first, the pair worked at Daiboshi. However, based on what we read from the wife’s diary, the amount of work he actually did is rather dubious.

“When he’s not fishing at the Five Lakes, he’s foraging for mushrooms at Mt. Fuji. Now he’s traveling to Tokyo and Nikko and who knows where else…”

Her words spell out her aggravation with her husband’s irresponsible ways. On top of doing the cleaning and chores, she spent her days working at the store until late at night, only to come home to rub her father-in-law’s shoulders and back. Sometimes she’d even bring home a kimono from work and stayed up all night tailoring.

Looking at their pictures from that time, he wore a sweet mask along with a dapper suit, but we caught on to the way his wife stood: one step behind him, like a maid.

He’d bar crawl every night; sometimes he’d get so wasted he’d make the geisha take him all the way to his front door. Half-resigned, she settled for locking the front door. The sight of him sidling along the veranda to enter the house was almost commonplace for their children.

She couldn’t survive as well as provide for her profligate husband on her sewing alone.

So, she decided “I’ll open a furniture store.”

The gutsy woman that she was, she proposed that they close her in-law’s kimono store, and they did in March of 1933. Then, she assembled paulownia chests and other large furniture items and decorated the homes and storefronts of Shimoyoshida. The old kimono shop’s glories were surely due in no small part to her achievements.

She passed away at 60 years old. Her widowed husband stood in front of her corpse for a whole night, his head hung low. What did he think as he looked back on the half-life he’d spent until then? We will never know.

Long ago they’d greet customers together and show them around the store. Nowadays, their grandchildren manage two stores: “Daiboshi Furniture”, and “Longtemps”. Both locales sell stylish imports and general Shimoyoshida sundries.

Part of the building is newly renovated, but you can still see parts of the old corrugated steel design in the walls, as well as original roof beams that have never been replaced. It’s a place that seems to recall the daily lives of a debaucherous man and the wife who took care of him.