Please feel free to judge me as much as you like for owning so many notebooks.
When there are such beautiful, functional notebooks as Kunisawa's, it is hard to resist collecting a few...
I ran out of A5 ring-bound notebooks, and those are my favourite as you can tear out pages easily. If you try to do that with another kind, you often end up with a mess on your hands - an unpleasant, ugly, papery mess.
But I do love my normal notebooks, most of all my Tomoe River Everyday Books. Wouldn't it be great if they were A5 ring-bound? Well, if they were and the paper was thicker, you'd get a Kunisawa product.
The smoothness of this paper astonishes me! It is easily as smooth at Tomoe River, with much less showthrough and ghosting and absolutely no bleedthrough. The notebook is bulkier than a Tomoe River, but it's a very small trade-off for such high performance.
It takes everything in its stride - wet inks, sheen, shimmer, pencil, markers, fineliners - and manages to show off everything that's great about the medium you're using. I used a very wet ink and the paper, instead of causing feathering, simply chose to show what good shading the ink has. I tried a highly sheening ink and far from absorbing all the sheen like more spongy, textured paper does, it showed the crazy, bright red colour perfectly.
Pencil doesn't smudge either- I rubbed the 'Smudge?' that I wrote, and even with vigorous rubbing the graphite barely moved, which is extremely good for a smooth paper!
As if the paper alone wasn't enough to make you buy one, the notebooks are also gorgeous!
I chose one with a dark blue (light navy?) cover, with rose-gold-coloured binding. It's such a lovely combination, and I'm glad I chose it even though the other colours were very tempting. It is gorgeous in a quietly sophisticated fashion, no fancy designs but still effective. I also like the minimal branding approach. The only writing is 'Kunisawa' along with their logo on the front cover, and inside the cover their motto 'I do not seek, I find' is printed almost invisibly. A piece of paper included with the notebook explains the origins of both the logo and motto.
If I were to stock up on any notebook, I think this would be the one. I love products that are minimalistic without compromising on beauty and most importantly, quality. I've never had a bad experience with Japanese stationery and Kunisawa are not an exception. If more companies, bring their products up to their standard, I will be a happy stationery enthusiast!
Disclaimer: Kunisawa provided this notebook for review purposes. All opinions expressed in this article are my own.