Championing Passion: A book owner's love for books and ‘zines’

The inspiring story behind a small bookstore owner in KL who’s passionate about books and fanzines.

By Chen Xian Bin — November 7, 2024 @ 11.00 pm

Tokosue Bookstore, located in Wisma Central at KLCC - Photo from: Will Chen

BOOKXCESS, Kinokuniya, MPH, and Popular. These four bookstores share one thing in common: they’re the biggest and most well-known bookstore brands in Malaysia. However, many people don't know that other bookstores, while small in size and don’t have the same social traffic compared to the bookstore juggernauts in KL, also exist with a love for literature.

Suzana Ahmad, avid book/zine lover - Photo from: The Star

Suzana Ahmad, more fondly referred to as Sue Emoqwin, always loved reading books, writing, and anything related to literature at a young age with a love for fanzines (published media for topics in an artistic/literature manner) as well. Growing up, she initially started working as a scriptwriter and copywriter for numerous individual clients, TV shows, and some films. However, at some point during the Covid pandemic lockdown in Malaysia, Suzana discovered online shopping via Shopee and used her love for books to sell on Shopee due to how profitable selling books was at that time, she also wrote a book during lockdown which was an anthology about women’s stories.

Cut to 2022 when the coronavirus lockdown was starting to fade away, Suzuna originally wanted to find a place to pack her books and send them to Shopee, but then she thought to herself if she could open a bookstore and display the books even if it's small, people might come to buy, and thus Tokosue was born.

In your opinion, why do think it’s important to create and foster interactions with people with the same interests as you?

I have this thing about having a place where my place can be a comfort place for people who is like us who actually like to read to books and like art and you know in a very busy city, it’s very hard to find a place where you can feel cozy. So, these people who came here become my friends and we actually help each other because when they do an event there, it’s very cheap so we can help them manage their event. We give them small refreshments, tea, cakes, and bouquets, but as our followers are very organic, the ones who follow Tokosue are really people who actually like this kind of thing.

So when we do events, people actually come. So when they come, they’re actually people of the same mind, so when they come, a lot of people make new friends in a Tokosue event, so then they grow… they meet and they grow. So partly I like to foster this kind of positive community event because I think we’re always in search of space to do this kind of thing and a lot of these events are self-funded, so Tokosue tries to work together in helping with other communities and to support each other, as they support us, we support them too.

I know that you’re an author and you published a book, but can you tell me what’s the name of the book and what was the inspiration for writing it in the first place? 

Are you familiar with the term Ikigai? It’s a Japanese term that says that: “the best place for you is where you have something that you like that can give you money and also can give you satisfaction in doing what you like and you can produce it for other people. So all of this when you overlap it, is your Ikigai.”

So what I’m saying is for someone who likes reading and writing, people always see that I am doing many many things, but I’m actually doing things related to what I like which is reading and writing and promoting reading and literature culture like books, poetry, or art so they’re actually very related, they’re actually my Ikigai, like my something that makes me feel like home.

Do you have plans for expansion? As in like relocating to a new place somewhere in KL?

I think- if I can, I would want to move to a place where there’s more crowd, but then in KL, it is very hard to find a cheap place, like this place in the old building is really cheap (the rent) and it has very easy access because it has one LRT and two MRT connecting.

So, I don’t think- I will ever- if I can let go of this place. Even if the business is not doing good, I will keep this place as my office for my publishing business, because it’s affordable, it’s near to KL and also I’m not very young. Soon I’ll be in my retirement age so I don’t feel I want to expand too big because that involves a lot of managing people and managing stores so I am more into like you make a little bit of profit, but that’s enough.

What was the importance for you to hold a Zine Day Out event (on July)?

Tokosue Bookstore holding its Zine Day Out Event (during July)  - Photo courtesy of Suzana Ahmad

Because I was part of people who liked zines who joined the community and events before, previously in KL, they have the KL Zine Festival and also we have the Penang Zine Festival, these were all done by our festivals. 

But after the PKP, a lot of the people who does the zine festival, they don’t want to do them anymore because some of them are struggling with their own jobs. 

So I was thinking since I have a place, why not do like a small thing to celebrate zines and to expose more about zine, actually to get more people be interested in zine and use it as self-expression. So, we did Zine Day Out, a small version of the Zine Festival, because in a Zine Festival, you would have like maybe 20-30 vendors selling zines and they’re like double-story or something like that. But for Zine Day Out, we’re just celebrating zines.

Zines hung on a paper board for attendees to vote for their favorite zines  - Photo courtesy of Suzana Ahmad

For this year, we did a competition. The first year we did, we actually have people who draw, and we also did a zine display. In July, as Tokosue is one of the few rare bookstores that sell zines, we would continuously do in the out day, because July is International Zine Month for the whole world, and zine culture is all over the world like Indonesia is even bigger they have the Bandung Zine Festival, Malaysia is not so big yet.