Journalism of Courage
Tsubaki Stationery Store: A gentle tale about the art of writing letters
Ito Ogawa's Tsubaki Stationery Store follows a small-town scribe who writes the letters others can't find the words for.
Ito Ogawa's Tsubaki Stationery Store. (Generated using AI)
Writing may be the cornerstone of the literary world, but it has inspired few stories about itself. Stephen King has written a couple: The Shining, where an author tries to revive his career and write a bestseller, and Misery, where a fanatical reader kidnaps an author and forces her to write a sequel come to mind. But even there, the focus falls on the artist, not the art. Ito Ogawa’s Tsubaki Stationery Store puts writing itself front and centre.
A store with a scribe
The book follows Hatoko Amemiya, nicknamed “Poppo,” a young woman who inherits a stationery store from her grandmother in the seaside town of Kamakura, Japan. Her real work, though, is that of a scribe: she writes letters for others. As she puts it:
“This place is a one-stop shop for anything to do with writing and words — even if at first glance it looks like no more than the local stationery store.”
The book turns on how Hatoko writes. A scribe chooses more than words and tone. She decides the style of writing (vertical or horizontal — Japanese allows both), the paper, ink, envelope. Ogawa explains each decision in gentle detail, as when Hatoko describes choosing her tools:
“Once I have formed a rough idea of a letter, my approach is to decide on the writing tools before getting down to the details. The same words can come across completely differently depending on whether you write them with a ballpoint pen, a fountain pen, a brush pen or a brush. (But not a pencil. Writing a letter in pencil is fundamentally impolite.)”
The art of writing for others
Hatoko’s gift is empathy: she captures the essence of the people she writes for. She talks to them first, when she can, and learns why they want a letter written:
“I wanted to convey everything of him… his tenderness and the way he spoke, his face, even his smell. A letter is an embodiment of its sender, after all…”
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These interactions give the book its stories. Some requests are routine; others are intimate. One client wants a letter refusing a loan. Another wants to write to a friend he hasn’t spoken to in years. A third wants to announce his divorce to the friends who attended his wedding.
Hatoko listens, then drafts each letter, and Ogawa walks us through the process. Even a stamp gets its due:
“If the front of an envelope was its face, then the stamp was like the lipstick that pulled the look together, and if you made a mess of your lipstick then that was all anyone would notice. It was only a stamp, just a stamp, and yet…”
A gentle book about writing and Japan
The book does more than trace a craft. It captures small-town Japanese life: its symbols, festivals, and beliefs, woven into Hatoko’s routine. At heart, this is a book about writing, the life of a scribe, and people who want to write but can’t find the words.
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At roughly 300 pages, Tsubaki Stationery Store is classic cosy Japanese fiction: it flows like a mountain stream through an idyllic town. There’s no plot to speak of, no suspense, no tension — only a woman living the life of a scribe, putting words on paper, discovering herself and the people around her as she goes. Hatoko’s letters appear in both English and Japanese, a touch that lends the book authenticity and lets readers see the real results of her work.
Two decades ago, Shyam Benegal directed *Welcome to Sajjanpur*, using a village scribe to expose social issues. Tsubaki Stationery Store also centres on a scribe, but it dwells instead on her writing and its quiet impact on the people around her.
You may forget the characters’ names and the town where they live, but you will find yourself wondering whether to write your next email on a laptop or a phone, weighing which font suits a note versus a document, and reaching for the notebooks and diaries gathering dust in some corner of your house. You will want to hear a pen scratch across paper again. Above all, you’ll write more — to friends, or to yourself. We certainly are.
Tsubaki Stationery Store
Ito Ogawa (translated by Cat Anderson)
296 pp
Penguin
Rs 899
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