KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 21 — Imagine yourself sitting in a quiet café somewhere, sipping on a nice cup of coffee or tea, slowly turning the pages of an engaging book, soft music playing in the background. It's pure and simple bliss, don't you think?

I have often found myself in this state and wondered if it could be prolonged, if one could perhaps preserve or recreate this atmosphere? What if one were surrounded by a near endless supply of books, what if one could spend all day reading? Why not, I decided, start a book café?

Now I thought I had stumbled upon an original idea but trust the Japanese to think of it first. Given that Japan is a voracious nation of readers as well as being the world’s third biggest importer of coffee, it seems to be a country designed for book cafés. What better place then, to go hunting down some of the most interesting and original book cafés.

Brooklyn Parlor

Hidden in the basement of Marui Annex (one of Shinjuku’s numerous shopping malls) lies a chic and modern café, which at a first glance isn’t too dissimilar to other trendy jazz and New York-themed cafés and restaurants.

Certainly Brooklyn Parlor has a NYC pub atmosphere being the only place in Tokyo to offer Brooklyn Lager on tap as well as other New York-style cocktails and contemporary American fare like the ubiquitous burgers and fries. A closer inspection soon reveals their distinctive feature – how many bars would have shelves upon shelves of books covering nearly every available wall?

Granted most of its young and fashionable crowd are reading the latest magazines rather than books. While The Velvet Underground or Serge Gainsbourg drifts from the speakers, couples and small groups of close friends sit at long communal tables and catch up on the latest from a variety of gossip mags with celebrities on their covers.

The tables at the corners, the closest to the bookcases, are taken by the solitary readers nursing a beer (rather than the cocktails the groups prefer) and a cigarette. These readers tend to grab the heftier and more serious tomes too; I catch the sight of the cover of one – Books Do Furnish A Room – and think that’s so true.

Brooklyn Parlor, B1 Shinjuku Marui Annex, 3-1-26, Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan. Open daily 11:30am – 11:30pm. Tel: +81-3-6457-7763 http://www.brooklynparlor.co.jp/

Bibliothèque

Elsewhere, in the quieter neighbourhood of Shibuya, we discover a sign scrawled over the window of a café which states that “The Book Store Is Here.” Yet the café Bibliothèque feels more like a library to us – serene, clean and austere.

In fact, instead of a store assistant or a barista, a “librarian” is employed, complete with frizzy, greying hair and scholarly glasses. The librarian Mr Karube invites us inside and to have a seat.

Comfortable sofas and dark wooden tables and chairs abound. Chandeliers hang low from the ceiling. A signed sketching of a heart by Andy Warhol on a hotel letterhead lies framed on a wall.

Bibliothèque takes the “book” part of the “book café” equation very seriously – more than 6,000 books can be found here, nearly all of them thick, coffee table volumes covering subjects as diverse as art, music, cinema, photography, architecture, design, advertising, fashion, food, and more. We find books on the French comic artist Moebius, the Slow Food Movement and even an out-of-print Bear Pond by Bruce Weber.

Customers are encouraged to spend their time reading, using the books as a reference, perhaps even doing some work here and not worry about being disturbed. The menu has only three items – coffee, tea or macha – each 500 yen and served with a small biscuit. This is the only price of entry to this haven of knowledge and learning – a price well worth paying for sanctuary.

Bibliothèque, 3-54-4 Sendagaya Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 151-0051, Japan. Opening hours: 12:00pm to 9:00pm Tuesday – Saturday; 12:00pm to 6:00pm on Sundays and holidays. Tel: +81-3-3408-9482 http://www.superedition.co.jp/biblio/

Café Bibliotic Hello!

Our last book café takes some searching; it’s hidden away in one of the small streets in the old neighbourhood of Nijo/Yanaginobanba in Kyoto. But once it’s sighted, it’s impossible to mistake it for anything else – it’s the only machiya (traditional Japanese townhouse) on the street with the large banana plants in the storefront (the thick cover of wide green leaves themselves almost eclipsed by a row of neatly parked bicycles).

The interior of Café Bibliotic Hello! may be the most awe-inspiring of the three book cafés – the requisite wall of books do not stop when they reach the ceiling but instead continue stretching up to the second floor, where we hover over metal walkways and look down past the wooden rafters upon the other patrons lost in their reading. It is almost as though we are transported to a library designed by industrialist architects.

And what a bohemian environment! Ikebana (Japanese flower arrangements) can be found all over the café while the barista switches the music from Emi Fujita to Sufjan Stevens. Two young girls in kimonos sit at the large wooden communal table, nibbling at their small and beautiful slices of cakes. A group of graphic designers huddle over a coffee table discussing their latest project. (They are later replaced by a solitary man in office attire occupying the entire space by himself, silently drinking coffee alone. We are impressed with how the staff allow him to be and to take his time; a similar scenario in KL would certainly have a waiter at one’s elbow requesting one to change to a smaller table.)

This is a place where one can relax and succumb to the magic and charm of good coffee and the company of a really good book, and so we do.

Café Bibliotic Hello! 650 Seimei-cho, Nijo Dori, Yanaginobanba-higashi iru, Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan. Open daily 11:30am – 12:00am. Tel: +81-75-231-8625 http://cafe-hello.jp/

Every book café feels different just as there are different kinds of readers. Some cafés are more casual, light reading and magazine gossip to go with jazz and beers.  Others are peaceful oases for deep contemplation over a serious book perhaps, a sort of private library opened to you, if only for a few hours. You could sit at a communal table with strangers or hide in a corner by yourself. These cafés are destinations for lovers of books and the places these books take us, the secret worlds we find in words.

Maybe one day I shall open my own book café too.