12 / matters magazine / fall 2026 A young girl walked into Kokoro carrying a paper flower. She had been com ing into the Maplewood store since she was little and wanted to give the handmade gift to Kiyomi Hubert, Kokoro’s longtime store manager. It was for good luck, she explained. She was happy the store was open again. It was the kind of gesture that might seem small unless you spent many years behind the counter watching children become teenagers, employees, parents and customers all over again. “You don’t realize what impact or effect you have on people,” says Susan Onuma, Kokoro owner and Maplewood resident. “You see people for a brief moment of time when they come into the shop.” For several months, they couldn’t. A ceiling col lapse had abruptly closed Kokoro, leaving Onuma to consider whether her season of running a shop was over. At the same time, South Orange resident Kimaya Salaskar learned that the building hous ing her store, Kimaya Kama, also on Maplewood Avenue, had been sold, and a significant rent in crease would force her to make a decision about her business. One woman had a store she wasn’t sure she could reopen. The other needed somewhere to go. Today, Kokoro and Kimaya Kama share the renovated storefront at 172 Maplewood Ave. They remain two distinct businesses, with separate in ventories, registers and identities. Yet their own ers have discovered that what they built separately over decades may have prepared them for what they are building together. Long before the two women became partners, Onuma was already making space for other wom en in business. She bought the building in 1991 while practicing law and envisioned it as a home for creative, women-owned businesses. Then one tenant decided to leave. “My hus band’s famous last words were, ‘Well, you always wanted to have a store. Why don’t you try some thing?’ ” Onuma says. So she did. In October 1993, she began taking Fridays off from her law practice and opened the store Friday through Sunday. “I thought if I didn’t do well at Christmas, then I probably shouldn’t be in the retail business,” she says. Christmas went well. Onuma discovered how much she loved the people who came through the door. The store introduced her to the neighbors she hadn’t gotten to know while commuting to New York City. “People of all walks of life would come in, and you begin to appreciate what a won derful, diverse, vibrant and creative community Maplewood is,” she says. Two Stores, One Door How Kokoro and Kimaya Kama found an unexpected way forward in Maplewood Village BY AMY LYNN-CRAMER PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIA MALOOF VERDEROSA Susan Onuma and Kiyomi Hubert with the paper flower a young girl gave them to honor the store's reopening. Susan Onuma and Kimaya Salaskar now share the same space for their shops.
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