What My Father Refused to Sell

What My Father Refused to Sell

My father's shop was a pawnshop first. Games came later — a friend handed him about fifty cartridges, and he set them on a shelf. This was the years when the Famicom was entering nearly every home in Japan, and the shelf did not stay small for long. More games came. We ran out of room. We turned our living space into selling space. The shop grew until it was a different shop.

Then the economy turned, and it shrank as fast as it had grown. One by one, the other game stores in our town closed. Near the end, only two were left, and ours was one of them. We kept on quietly for a while. Then we closed too.

But my father would not let the stock go. Year after year it sat in boxes. He had stopped selling, yet he could not bring himself to part with a single cartridge. Some part of him, I think, did not believe the shop was finished.

He only loosened his grip when he was near death. "You can let it go now," he told me — not "sell it," just "let it go." When the games turned into money, he accepted it quietly, with something like sadness on his face. He had held them for so long.

Not all of them, but many, have since traveled across the world. A cartridge my father guarded for years now sits in a home in another country, switched on by hands he never met. I did not reopen his shop. I carried what he could not throw away, and let other people keep it a while longer for him.