Sailor Manyo Nekoyanagi

Sailor Manyo inks are a new release of 8 inks from Sailor, available to the international market. I received mine from a pre-order I made last week and I’m super excited to share a quick review of these inks with you.

The Sailor Manyo inks are based on flowers found in the Manyoshu, an collection of ancient Japanese poems. Luckily, they are permanent and not limited edition.

I purchased 3 of the inks – Haha, Nekoyanagi and Yomogi – they seemed the most unique and usable (to me, based on what I have in my current collection).

It was a writing sample of Nekoyanagi that convinced me to purchase these inks, I love the purple with blue and ink undertones, so this was the first ink I inked up in my Newton Eastman. My Eastman has a nice wet nib which I thought would be perfect for the ink.

Weirdly, when I inked my pen and wrote, the ink looked nothing like the swatches I’d seen. It was a dusky purple. At first, I thought maybe it was because the pen had some ink leftover from its previous inking. I’ve talked before about being a bit of a lazy pen cleaner and usually any contamination (for me) seems to run out after a few lines, but this kept on going. I pushed ink out of pen and tried again, with the same results.

I inked it up in my usual testing pens (Pilot Heritage 912 FA Spencerian Ground and TWSBI 580 AL) and there seemed to be no problems. I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the Newton being so much wetter than the other pens I own, but I wouldn’t have thought so? If anyone else has also experienced this, let me know.

Onto the ink itself, its stunning and to my mind very unique. I’ve seen it compared to the Sailor studio 123 ink which I think is less bright (duskier) and with more green undertones compared to the blue/pink of the Nekoyanagi. The undertones don’t appear to be the result of any sheen, unlike the Bungubox Tipsy Purple. As a result, the vibrancy of the colour was clearly visible on all papers I tested, including the “roughest” Fabriano. I had no issues with flow and it seems to clean out really easily.

PS: Please excuse the misspelling of Nekoyanagi 

Based on the undertone of this ink, I really have nothing in my collection to compare this to. The brightness and colour of the main purple is similar to the Kobe Ink Story #57, although I think that is brighter and pinker. Nekoyanagi swatches very pale and watery - I swatched it to compare against Kobe Ink Story #57 but the colour was not representative of what shows up in the nib. 

I love this ink. If they ever discontinue, I will have to get a back up. Or two.