Writers are supposed to have some mystical bond with their pens. With solemn gravity, in places like Paris Review interviews, they are asked what they write with, as if their pen strokes were what readers ultimately consumed. At times, I feel as if I should have some weighty, burnished fountain pen that, as that ad for some luxury product goes, I don’t own but merely “look after for the next generation.” But as a left-­hander with world-­historically abysmal handwriting — in college, college, I once had to read an essay out loud to an indulgent professor from my exam blue book — I have never managed much affection for manual writing instruments.

That changed some years ago when an architect friend introduced me to the pleasures of inexpensive Japanese pens. In a small black notebook with graph-­paper pages, he was incessantly sketching or inscribing with a precision that left me achingly envious. His to-­do lists were works of Vitruvian wonder. If only my own writing could look so exact, then my very thoughts might become more clear. One day, I took a closer look at his pen. It was thin, plastic and decorated with kanji characters. “Kinokuniya,” he said. “You’ve got to go.”

And so, on a lunch break from the main branch of the New York Public Library, I made my first of countless pilgrimages to that Japanese bookstore. Feeling a bit too much like the sort of trenchcoat-­wearing creep who used to inhabit Times Square, I would, semifurtively, repair to the stationery department with a frequency that probably made the security guy nervous.

There, arrayed like a kind of shrine, was the pen collection. Not behind glass, not packaged, just there, a thousand vessels of ink to be held, examined and written with on helpfully supplied pieces of paper. The variety was staggering. Where an American shop would offer some desultory Paper Mate ballpoints in blue and black, here were countless brands I had never heard of, in a ridiculous spectrum of colors, with more nib sizes than I knew existed. In a sweaty otaku fervor — like those fanboys who haunt Tokyo’s manga shops — I would carefully pick a dozen and scuttle back to the library.