Hobonichi Kyohei Sakaguchi: A Notebook to Help Me Remember

The Hobonichi Kyohei Sakaguchi: "A Notebook to Help Me Remember" is an A5 grid notebook in landscape format – designed to present Sakaguchi's pastel landscapes exactly as they were created: as continuous images that need the landscape format to breathe. Kyohei Sakaguchi is a writer, painter, musician and architect; his landscapes are created with pastel chalk and bare fingers, realistic in effect, handmade in texture. The notebook is printed on Tomoe River paper – thin, smooth, ink-resistant – with a 5 mm grid in delicate sky blue.

Features

• Landscape A5 (149 × 210 mm): The horizontal layout follows directly from the front cover motif – "En Route to Kumamoto Port at Dawn", the same artwork as the Hobonichi Techo Weeks cover, here readable as a continuous landscape format.
• Back cover "Night in Porto (May 31, 2020)": Front and back covers together form a day's arc – morning light at the front, evening mood at the back – from Sakaguchi's pastel series.
• Tomoe River paper, 288 pages: The paper developed for Hobonichi notebooks is thin yet tear-resistant, absorbs fountain pen ink richly without bleed-through and allows very fine line definition.
• 5 mm grid in sky blue: The grid is somewhat more generous than in the standard Hobonichi and printed in such a light shade of blue that it hardly registers as a distraction when writing and drawing.
• 180° flat opening: The thread binding allows double pages to open completely flat – no bending, no loss of space at the binding edge.
• Silver foil title lettering: The text "A notebook to help me remember" is from Sakaguchi's food diary COOK and is embossed in silver foil on the cover.

Use & Tips

• Landscape format and fountain pens: The Tomoe River paper handles wet inks well – broad nibs with rich ink flow show their full line variation on this surface. Allow drying time, especially with very wet inks.
• Double-page sketches: The 180° flat opening transforms the notebook into one continuous drawing surface. In landscape format, panoramic sketches emerge that match the visual concept of the covers.
• Horizontal planning and mind maps: The landscape format with 5 mm grid works well for timelines, weekly overviews without fixed date fields and branching thought structures that become too cramped in portrait orientation.
• Hand lettering and calligraphy: The smooth, lightly calendered surface of Tomoe River paper gives stub nibs controlled release – the ink flows evenly without soaking into the fibre.
• Fast-drying gel pens and oil-based ballpoint refills also work without issue; with very wet inks, a brief air-dry before closing is recommended.
• The light sky blue grid can be easily filtered out when scanning or photographing pages – practical for anyone processing handwritten content digitally.

For Paper Enthusiasts

The Tomoe River paper used in this notebook is the same as that used in Hobonichi Techo books: extremely thin, yet with surface strength that withstands even heavily pigmented fountain pen inks and India ink. The 288 pages yield a remarkable page count in a compact block for Tomoe River standards, with an 11 mm spine width. The 5 mm grid in sky blue is deliberately printed lighter than the standard Hobonichi grid – a detail that makes all the difference, especially for drawing and calligraphy, because the lines don't optically overlay the script. Sakaguchi's pastel works on the covers are not reproductions of printed templates: they were created by applying and blending pastel chalk with bare fingers on paper – the angular texture of the pigment and the smudge marks of the fingers are visible in the original work and give the covers a recognisably handmade surface despite their photorealistic effect.

Technical Specifications