Morioka Shoten Ginza: A Bookstore That Only Carries One Title Per Week

Photos by Miyuki Kaneko courtesy Takram

Issatsu, Isshitsu (一冊、一室). It’s a phrase that literally translates to ‘A Single Room, A Single Book,’ and it’s one that’s come to define a small, minimal bookshop in the backstreets of Ginza. As the name would lead you to believe, you won’t be doing any browsing here. Morioka Shoten offers only one title per week to its visitors.

The brainchild of this radical yet charming idea is bookstore clerk Yoshiyuki Morioka, who’s worked in the book industry for almost 2 decades. At its core, Morioka Shoten is an experiment in extreme curated content: the owner chooses a single book to offer to his clientele. Through talks, exhibitions and events to meet the author, visitors are offered an intimate opportunity to explore a book and enhance their joy of reading it. Although bold, Morioka Shoten offers an experience that would be impossible to replicate for online booksellers or even large bookshops.

The branding for Morioka Shoten, which opened in May of 2015, was created by Takram Design Studio, who played a part in the serendipitous creation of the bookshop:

The birth of “a bookstore with a single book” was brought about by a rather unique encounter. On 2nd September 2014, Masamichi Toyama (CEO of Smiles Co. Ltd.) gave a lecture at “takram academy”, a serial lecture event run by takram. With “New Business” as the theme of the lecture, every attendee presented an idea which could win a business opportunity if the idea was bought by Toyama. Morioka attended the event and presented his idea with only one sheet of presentation which said, “Regeneration of Bookseller Atom → A bookstore with a single book”.