keeps the blues away: nakabayashi yu-sari lined a5 notebook
There’s a new building right across from ours. It’s still empty, they’re finishing the indoors and it’s a looming darkness for now. In the evenings it comes alive. The lights from our apartment building reflects onto the dark windows, where figures in light cook dinner, dance and laugh. You can see out upstairs neighbour setting up the table, our next door neighbour watching tv, us reading on the couch. They all reflect back to us from the dark windows of the construction, distorted only by crisscrossing shadows of scaffolding and distance.
I have started writing morning pages every morning. It takes time to write three pages by hand, but it has been helping me a lot to clear my mind and start working with a fresh, empty head. Funnily enough, it also helped me a lot to love fountain pens again. Turns out, I was distanced from the hobby simply because I wasn’t using my pens enough. With this opportunity, I’ve been rotating through pens quite often and got back into the habit of journaling. One downside of this has been that I started going through notebooks quite quick.
Now, imagine yourself, in one sunny September morning in Istanbul, you’re enjoying a warm mug of coffee and journaling on the balcony. You finish up your writing and suddenly realize that you only have 4-5 pages left in your journal. Of course, the only sensible thing is to go to Galen Leather’s website and search for emergency notebooks. I decided to order the newish Yu-Sari notebooks, which I didn’t have a chance to try before. The price is pretty good, and the reviews I looked up were glowing, so I thought it was worth a shot.
Now that I’ve written through a Yu-Sari notebook as well, I can honestly say that this notebook has set a new benchmark for Japanese notebooks for me.
Nakabayashi is a company that’s well-versed in fountain pen affairs, they are also related to Taccia, manufacturer of one of my favourite fountain pen inks, Sabimidori. The notebook was delivered pretty quickly, and I opened the beautiful package to see a plain, black notebook with gold foiling. The notebook has sturdy cardboard covers, which held up pretty well to two months of daily use. Granted, the only adventure it took was the flight back from Istanbul, so… Anyway, the black covers sparked something in me to decorate it with a lot of stickers, which I rarely do usually. I’m happy to say that the stickers stick to the cover pretty well.
When you open the notebook, the binding does let the pages stay flat quite easily, but I tend to really press down on the spine to fully open the page I’m writing on. You can see the effect of that, my notebook’s spine is curved back and doesn’t really stay nice and square anymore. It became a soft, floppy notebook that stays perfectly open without anything holding it down.
On the inside, there are 96 sheets of slightly off-white paper with 8mm lines. It’s an unexpectedly thick paper, I thought I was flipping two pages at once on more than one occasion. The dry times can be a little slow on saturated inks in a wet nib too. One thing is that I tend to write quite small, and I wish the lines were a bit more narrow. On pages I use a fine or an extra fine nib, it feels like half the page is still empty. It makes it pretty great with 1.1 stub pens and shimmer inks though. The inks didn’t feather at all, and the only ghosting happened with dark inks and very wet pens.
Seeing all this amazing performance, I decided to throw even more ink at it to see how it holds up. I got some cotton swabs and got to work. There’s something very satisfying about getting a good notebook that behaves well with everything, and you just try more and more weird things with it to push it. I know most people like swatching inks like this, and I usually don’t even really think about it. For me inks are to write with, so they rarely get pooled on the page like this.
It handled regular inks and sheening inks pretty well, no bleed through and minimal ghosting. I used Diamine Pumpkin to test it with super bright inks and Troublemaker Foxglove to see how the double shaders work, and it did show the pink-blue shading well. All of the ink colours I tried show quite well and vibrant on the page. Then, I decided to put so much ink on the page that there was a dome of ink on the surface. It took literal days to dry, though apparently it needed longer, as I managed to close the notebook before it was completely dry and messed up the writing on the other page. Well, turns out if you put so much ink on it, it does feather. The shimmer also stopped holding on to the page well, and now there’re shimmer particles on my hands now. Amazingly enough, even that much ink only bled through to the back, and didn’t transfer colour to the sheet behind it. It did bubble up slightly from the dampness still.
All in all, I think it’s an amazing paper for regular use, and the price is just a huge bonus. I like the binding and how nice it feels too, and can’t wait to get more of these notebooks to write in!
Thank you for reading! Unfortunately, the Netherlands hasn’t seen sunlight in a while now, so all the pictures have a slight blue tint to them from the cloudy skies.
Disclaimer: Galen Leather did sponsor this blog in the past, but it is not the case for this notebook. All photos and opinions are my own.