Notes From the Ginza Shihodo Stationery Shop

How could you not want to read a book that has a cat and Mont Blanc pens on the cover and talks about real stationery products? Well I certainly couldn’t, and I don’t regret a thing. Although this is the second volume of the set it works perfectly well as a stand-alone. A series of unrelated stories of happenings in and around the eponymous stationery store. This is an easy read, both in terms of the short, declarative language used, and in the straight-forward but none-the-less interesting stories, each short enough to read in a single sitting. We learn the backstories of some of the characters from the first book, some new customers arrive and we learn a lot about stationery products too. I really enjoyed this, the stories are charming, undemanding but nicely constructed as separate pieces - there’s no attempt to link them together in some intricate lace, just the plain facts. I was inspired to look again at my own (embarrassingly large) collection of pens, notebooks and sketchpads…