Shoan Bunko: A Book Cafe & Gallery in Nishi-Ogikubo

What should you serve on your favorite tableware? What tableware should you choose for your favorite food? Time spent reflecting on such questions is very special. In this series, “Tales of Tableware,” our guests share their stories of the tableware and food they love. We also ask them about their lifestyle, passions, and dreams.

In this installment, we talk with Okazaki Tomomi, owner of the Gallery & Book Café Shoan Bunko in the Nishi-Ogikubo neighborhood of Tokyo.

A penchant for everyday tableware that brightens your mood

Sunlight streams softly through the large windows. The chairs and tables have all the more character because they’re so well used. Time passes at a more leisurely pace here. You find yourself thinking how wonderful it would be to slip a book off the shelf, sit back on the sofa, and crack it open over a delicious coffee.

“This building was originally the home of a musician couple,” Tomomi explains. “We never intended to open a café. But then the husband passed away, and the wife said the place was too big for her on her own, and she was planning on getting rid of it. We were living nearby, and she invited us over and showed us around. I felt an instinctive desire to preserve the place.”

What could be done to preserve the home, Tomomi asked herself. Then she had an idea. She decided to turn it into a gallery and book café so that others could share the space and enjoy the leisurely passage of time there.

“I’d never dreamed of running a café. But now, six years later, we have a wonderful staff and get plenty of customers, for which I’m truly grateful,” says Tomomi with a smile.

Tucked away in a residential area of Nishi-Ogikubo, the café is today a favorite with many. Here you can spend time as you like: having lunch, reading a book over tea or coffee, checking out the wares in the gallery, dropping by a special event.

The gallery area displays tableware and housewares of varied provenance. There are glasses from Okayama, pitchers from Vietnam, and platters from Kazakhstan. Despite their completely different origins, all blend seamlessly into the interior.

We ask Tomomi how she goes about selecting the tableware and housewares on display. “Well, it’s a matter of intuition,” she replies. She then elaborates, weighing each word in her mind.

“When I see a piece of tableware or houseware, what matters to me is whether I can envision someone using it. Take a basket, for instance. I like the look of a basket hard at work. So whether it’s antique or new, what I ask myself is this. Is there a place in the home where the basket will fit right in? Does it have what it takes to do that? That’s how I choose. I also find it exciting when I come across something from abroad that I’ve never seen before, or something that I feel I’ve always wanted but could never put into words.”

Some pieces have gradually made Tomomi aware of her own predilections.
“To be honest, before I started up the café, I didn’t have a clear idea of how to incorporate glassware into daily meals except in the form of drinking glasses or salad bowls. That was especially the case with shiny glassware. I found it cold and off-putting.”

Then Tomomi came across an item that transformed her perception of glass.
“I was visiting a gallery somewhere, and there was this piece of glassware sitting there all on its own. It looked so lovely. It cast such a beautiful shadow in the evening sun. ‘Oh dear,’ I thought to myself. ‘I never realized that glass could be so attractive.’”
The piece, she was told, was the work of artist Ishikawa Masahiro. She took it home, where she must have looked at it on her dining table a hundred times. She was mesmerized by it.

“It looks wonderful even when you serve something very ordinary like potato salad in it. I feel like it boosts my spirits. That’s what I love about tableware. It’s part of your everyday life, yet it brightens your mood a little.”

Ever since, Tomomi has been more conscious of her own preferences in glassware. She can now relate to glassware much more than she used to.

The café now serves water in glasses by Ishikawa Masahiro.

Pieces brought home from my travels are daily reminders of time spent in faraway places.

Tomomi is attracted to pieces that are suited to everyday use but, far from being prosaic, are excitingly fresh and new. That, she says, may have something to do with her memories of her grandfather’s home.

“My great-grandfather, I’m told, traveled to France as a physician. For that reason, the antique sideboards in my grandfather’s home were full of dishes redolent of foreign lands. As a little girl, I wanted to look at them all the time.”

Influenced perhaps by such memories, Tomomi now loves to travel. She visits many different places and brings home various wares. The piece she will share with us here is one of them. It’s a souvenir of her travels that she uses daily.

“This piece is by an artist named Omine Jissei. I came across it on a visit to a kiln in Okinawa. That must have been seven or eight years ago.

The best-known form of Okinawan pottery has a distinctive color pattern, and Tomomi is fond of it as well. But this dish she fell in love with at first sight.

“I use it for serving very ordinary side dishes like pickled vegetables, edamame (boiled green soybeans), dashimaki tamago (rolled omelet flavored with dashi stock), and kinpira (sautéed and simmered root vegetables). But serving them in this dish makes them look a bit more special. It’s the perfect color and shape and beautifully sleek. While blending in with our other tableware, it transforms the look of our dining table with its unusual foot. I just love it.”

The pieces she buys on her travels, Tomomi says, continue to enrich her life after she returns home.

“Once I get back into my daily routine, holding those pieces in my hand brings back memories of my travels. It evokes scenes of the places I visited and the artists I met. I think that’s so valuable. Bringing home tableware from your travels is a lot of work [laughs]. What if they break? What if they’re too heavy? Still, bringing home travel memories and being able to bask in them indefinitely is such fun. That’s why I always end up carting home heavy pieces of tableware from my travels.”

Omine Jissei’s wares turn an ordinary dining table into something special.

The first piece of tableware that Tomomi ever brought back from her travels was particularly memorable.

“I must have still been in my early twenties. I spent a month traveling from Malaysia to Turkey and across Europe before returning to Malaysia. I visited cities with different cultures and came across many things I’d never seen before. One of them was a lovely eggcup I came across in Britain. I clearly remember thinking to myself, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ I wanted to show it to everyone.”

That was long before she opened the café and gallery. Yet even then, to her own surprise as she looks back today, she reacted in exactly as she would now. She didn’t just want to try using the thing. She didn’t just want it for herself. She wanted to show it to everyone. Tomomi occasionally recalls that trip. It was how she got started on the path to where she is today.

“These days I spend a lot of time at the café, so I have fewer opportunities to travel in search of new wares than I used to. Instead, people I know bring in pieces unlike any I’ve ever seen before. That’s something I really look forward to. Somewhere at the back of my mind, though, I’m always thinking there must be all kinds of things across the globe that I have no inkling about. I dream of tracking some down and bringing them home. One day, it may be the season for adventure again,” Tomomi says with a bright look.

Shoan Bunko started out as an idea for preserving an old home. Now, six years later, it brings patrons and staff together in the presence of tableware and housewares evocative of countless journeys. It continues to brighten people’s lives today.