You won't smell moth balls, the scent Paul Murakami remembers. And you won't taste samples of rice candy, like he did.

But you will see his aunts' smiling faces on life-size cutouts. You'll see an ancient cash register from the store their family ran, a neighborhood hub offering everything from kimonos to kitchenware, from tools to toys to toiletries.

"They were always the most gracious and generous people," recalls Murakami, 61, of Seattle.

His aunts, Ayako "Aya" Murakami and Masako "Masa" Murakami, were the last two living members of an immediate family whose story spans more than a century, a story that illustrates enterprise and courage, hardship and resilience, and most important, community.

"Meet Me at Higo: An Enduring Story of a Japanese American Family" opens as an exhibit Dec. 2 at the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience. In conjunction with the exhibit, the museum in Seattle's Chinatown International District has published a book of the same name, by Seattle area author Ken Mochizuki.

Both explore the lives of Japanese immigrants Sanzo and Matsuyo Murakami, their four children and the store their world revolved around.

It was 1909, and Sanzo Murakami had been in the U.S. just a couple of years when he opened the Higo 10-Cent Store on South Weller Street.

Matsuyo came three years later to be his bride. In fact, records show they married on the very day she arrived in Seattle.

By 1932, the Higo store was so successful Murakami built a two-story brick building on South Jackson Street and Sixth Avenue South for his expanded business, renamed Higo Variety Store. The building was built large enough for other ground-floor businesses and professional offices upstairs, although the Depression reduced the number of available tenants.

"For the family, it wasn't just a business," said Michelle Kumata, Wing Luke exhibits manager. "They made connections with people of all kinds. And through that, they created community."

In the decades before World War II, as widespread discrimination limited where Japanese immigrants could live or work, the Higo store was an anchor of Seattle's Nihonmachi, or Japantown.

Nihonmachi offered a thriving support system of shops, restaurants, hotels, markets, temples, churches, banks, bathhouses, bookstores and more.

The Higo store imported products from Japan, including foods and kitchen implements for traditional dishes, as well as the stuff of everyday life in the U.S.

The Murakami family lived upstairs from the Jackson Street store, and all four children worked there when they weren't in school.

One item depicted in the museum display is the 1936 diary in which the couple's second child, daughter Chiyoko, told of goings-on in the shop, along with her own failing health. The year would prove to be her last: She died of tuberculosis at age 22.

As tensions between the U.S. and Japan heightened through the 1930s, Japanese immigrants became increasingly viewed with suspicion.

In the aftermath of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, signed on Feb. 19, 1942. It led to the relocation into camps of more than 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast.

As the Murakamis boarded up their store and decided which few possessions to take, uncertain where they were headed, one item in particular spoke to their hope and determination: a crowbar for removing the boards from the windows on their return.

Even in the difficult world of the remote Minidoka relocation camp in Idaho, the essence of community was revived.

Aya and Masa taught English to fourth-graders, and in one assignment, told them to write about their lives and ambitions. The range of the youngsters' intended careers — airplane pilot, dentist, baseball player, "horse-rider," farmer, teacher and "office girl" — belied their condition as prisoners in their own country.

While many Japanese business owners lost everything during the relocation, the Murakamis' property was watched over by its remaining tenants, Julius Blumenthal and half-brother Maurice Zimmer, operators of a pawnshop.

The family's crowbar was finally put to its intended use in January 1945, but the joy of homecoming was short-lived: Sanzo Murakami died of a heart attack eight days after returning to Seattle.

The store carried on, operated by Matsuyo Murakami, along with her two living daughters, and only son, Kazuichi "Kay" Murakami.

It was Kay Murakami who figures largely in one story about Higo, that of 72-year-old Yuzo Tokita, who grew up at a nearby hotel his family ran.

Tokita said he was about 10 when he came into the store with three younger siblings to buy a present for their mother. A burgundy-colored clock radio caught his eye.

How much is it? He asked Kay. How much do you have? Kay responded.

Tokita took out the money the children had pooled: just a few dollars, much of it in coins. Kay neatly laid it on the counter and said what a coincidence — it was the exact price of the clock.

"They wrapped it up and put a big bow on it," Tokita said. "Only years later did I realize the real price must have been at least three times what they charged us," he said. "But that's the way they were, very generous, very caring."

(A postscript: Tokita's mother had the clock radio next to her bed — still running — until the day she died, decades later, at 91.)

After the deaths of Kay in 1982 and Aya in 1999, the store became a lot for Masa to manage.

None of the Murakami siblings married or had children. Paul Murakami said they likely ascribed to a Japanese tradition that the oldest child would marry first, and since Aya didn't marry, the others did not. (Masa Murakami passed away in 2010.)

Over time, Paul Murakami and a brother took on a larger role in managing the property, seeking a new tenant who would honor the store's character and role in the community.

They found that in John Bisbee and Binko Chiong-Bisbee, owners of the Kobo shop and gallery on Capitol Hill.

In 2004, the year after Higo closed as a variety store, the Bisbees reopened it as Kobo at Higo, a combination gallery-shop and mini-museum which, by early next year, will have a permanent display about the Higo store's past.

Reviving interest in the store is part of a broader effort to rekindle and restore the sense of community in Nihonmachi, which ebbed in the decades after World War II. Some sights and faces of Nihonmachi are displayed in another Wing Luke exhibit, "Vintage Japantown: Through the Lens of the Takano Studio," a collection of black-and-white portraits from a longtime area photo studio.

Despite Nihonmachi's significance, Paul Murakami is sure his relatives would be reluctant to take the spotlight.

"They were always so humble and modest," he said. "They would say, 'What's all the fuss about?' But I can't think of a more fitting way to honor them and all that they went through."

Jack Broom: 206-464-2222 or jbroom@seattletimes.com