Right paper, right pen, right desk – in this case, a weathered writing desk on the first floor of a stationery shop in downtown Tokyo – and the words will flow. This is the premise of Letters from the Ginza Shihodo Stationery Shop, a series of five short vignettes anchored in the “venerable” (the word is used often) stationery store in the upmarket Ginza shopping district.
Under the insistent attentiveness of owner-manager Ken Takarada, his customers reconnect to their past through well-chosen paper, perfectly brewed tea, their own favoured writing tools and a gentle line of questioning: “Would you mind telling me your circumstances?”
A shy young man wants to write a letter of thanks to his grandmother who raised him. He brings with him the Montblanc Meisterstück fountain pen she gave him in what proves to be a crucial moment in their relationship.
A successful hostess at a well-known Ginza club arrives with her Filofax Notebook Classic to write a letter of resignation to the owner, who cared for her and put her on the path of a successful career.
A student, the vice-captain of a high school archery club, wants to further her relationship with the club captain. This she does through a Kokuyo Campus notebook, traditionally used for club practice notes.
A man struggling to write a funeral address for his first wife builds his story on the postcards he sent her when they first met.
A sushi chef wants to acknowledge the restaurant owner who supported him and prompted his habit of note-taking in a Rhodia memo pad. “I’ve never written a letter in my life,” he explains, but, with Takarada’s encouragement, he writes his letter of thanks and apology.
Japanese fiction is in high demand. It’s been estimated that of the top 40 translated fiction titles in the 11 months to November 2024, more than 40% were Japanese, including Haruki Murakami’s 15th novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Most of these were what one commentator dubbed “comfort” books, with their predictable mix of coffee shops, bookstores, libraries and cats.
There are no cats in these temperate stories of gratitude and forgiveness, but there is a quiet connoisseurship in the appreciation of everyday objects, implicit in the lengthy details of paper, pen and ink as well as food, hospitality and gamesmanship.
As a novel, it is a straightforward but light-footed read, at times almost naive, and some of the subtleties of Japanese forms of address are obscure. It has been likened to the popular Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, by Satoshi Yagisawa, but its episodic structure also has a cinematic quality, reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes. Customers arrive, they share their story, in most cases they write, then they leave.
But there is something else going on here, “something mysterious”, says one character, “about the atmosphere”.
The landmark for the shop, for example, is an old-fashioned cylindrical postbox. Not Tardis-like, not even a wizardy Platform 9¾, but more akin to Murikami’s inconspicuous portals – a well, staircase or lift that takes the character into a slightly skewed reality. The towering shelves of stationery are dreamlike; the fountain pen, notebook and memo pad small portals to another time. At the conclusion of each vignette, shop and owner fade into a detached formality. As one chapter ends, “The CLOSED TODAY sign was up at a little stationery shop in one corner of Ginza, and the sales floor was enveloped in silence.”
The result is a momentary, slight and slightly cryptic paean to the hand-written word, to setting things right, to small oases of comfort.
