The Ink-Keeper's Apprentice Read online

  "Grandmother, have you ever heard of Noro Shinpei?" I asked her.

  "What kind of name is that?"

  "A pen name. He's a famous cartoonist."

  "What a disrespectful name. Slow Soldier ... it's not even amusing. Slow Soldier? Was there something about him in the paper recently? And a boy from Osaka?"

  "Yes, the same one," I said quickly. "Tokida is the boy's name. Do you remember, he walked for sixteen days to come to Tokyo and Sensei—I mean, Noro Shinpei." In my mind I was already beginning to refer to Noro Shinpei as a sensei, a master.

  "Yes, I remember," said Grandmother. "It was an unusual story. Why do you ask?"

  "No reason. I wondered if you know who he is. I think he's the best cartoonist there is."

  "And who cares about a cartoonist?"

  "Don't you think I should become a cartoonist?" I asked.

  "Don't talk rubbish. Your mother is not sending you to a good school so you can draw silly pictures. A cartoonist, indeed! Remember your blood, Koichi."

  "I'm only joking," I said.

  That was her favorite expression, Remember your blood. She came from an old samurai family. So had Grandfather. His ancestors had been proud warriors for four hundred years. But the Second World War had made my grandparents paupers. Grandfather was dead now. My mother was supporting Grandmother and me. And Grandmother still held on to old traditions. Such things as a good family name, genteel upbringing, and good schooling were important to her. And most of all, our lineage.

  Suddenly I wanted to leave Grandmother's house at once. I had to tell someone about my sensei.

  "May I take another set of sheets?" I asked. "I think there's an extra set upstairs." Grandmother nodded without looking up.

  I went upstairs to the small six-mat room and found a set of sheets and a pillowcase in the closet. The room was the way I'd left it almost a year ago. It had been my room since I'd come to Tokyo to go to school, and now the only trace of my stay there was some thumbtack holes in the wall where I used to pin my drawings.

  "Stay for supper; I bought two fish today," said Grandmother when I came downstairs.

  "Thank you, but I really should be going," I said, and looked at my watch. "I have some studying to do."

  "I thought this was spring vacation."

  "Yes, but they gave us a lot of homework."

  "Do as you wish. But make sure you eat something."

  "Yes, I will. I'll see you at the end of the month," I said, and left her.

  It was a great relief to leave Grandmother's house. Sometimes I felt like shouting at her. I didn't know why I had gone to see her in the first place. I was used to being alone, but today I felt the need to talk to someone. Grandmother was the only relative I had in Tokyo, and I didn't have a close friend. I had thought perhaps there was a chance Grandmother would understand that I wanted to be a cartoonist. I should have known better.

  But even so, nothing could dampen my spirits. Perhaps Grandmother will soften someday, I thought as I walked on the busy street toward the train station. I traced in my mind every detail of Sensei's studio, repeated some of the things he had said, and chuckled to myself.

  For no reason I stopped in front of a restaurant and stared absentmindedly at the sample dishes in the window. There were rows of plastic noodles, meats, and fish cakes made out of rubbery material, looking ghastly in the milky light of fluorescent lamps. Ordinarily the sight would have sickened me, but suddenly I felt hungry. I'll order the most expensive dish, I said to myself, and walked in.

  ***

  It was dark when I got home. I squeezed around my bicycle that took up most of the porch, kicked off my shoes, and went in. I'd been living there by myself since I'd left Grandmother's house. The square eight-mat room, about twelve by twelve feet, had a flush toilet by the porch, a washbasin, a tiny closet, and a big sliding window. There were no cooking facilities so I ate all my meals out. It was housing for the poor, the kind of place the old-time residents of Tokyo used to call the eel's bed.

  With a good deal of satisfaction I looked around my room in the harsh light of the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. It was quiet. The only noise came from the round alarm clock with two bells on top, beating like my heart. I looked in the chipped mirror above the washbasin and grinned at myself. Then I filled the kettle and turned the hot plate on. Grandmother had given them to me; she said the hot plate would keep me warm on cold winter nights.

  I lit a candle and turned out the overhead light, and thought about the day. Often I read the books I liked by candlelight. Grandmother would never have allowed it. Also she never let me stay up late. It was good to live alone.

  I had nearly fallen asleep at my desk when I heard a knock on my door. It was my next-door neighbor, Mr. Kubota. There was a slight tinge of red around his eyes. Drinking, I thought. He was about twenty-one, and his short hair was always neatly parted in the center. He was studying literature at a university, and he also held a second-degree black belt in karate. I had been to his room several times and had beer with him, but this was the first time he came to see me.

  "How goes it, Sei-san?" he asked. "Something the matter with your lights?"

  "No, I was just thinking," I said, turning on the overhead light. "Can I pour a cup of tea for you?"

  "No, thank you, that would sober me up. I'm on my way to the Ginza. A little drinking with some bad friends, you know. I saw your candle burning and thought you'd blown a fuse or something."

  Suddenly I thought of Sensei.

  "Mr. Kubota, you know who Noro Shinpei is, don't you?"

  "The cartoonist?"

  "Yes. I'm his pupil."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I went to see him today and asked him if I could study with him and he said yes."

  "Remarkable. Wait a minute, I'll be right back," he said and was gone. In a moment he was back with a half-filled bottle of port wine.

  "This calls for a celebration. Here, have some, it'll get your circulation going." He handed me the bottle. I poured him some wine in a teacup.

  "Tell me what happened," he said as he drank from the large cup. I told him about Sensei with great excitement. It was wonderful to have a good listener.

  "Remarkable," he said again. "I feel as though I'm hearing a story from another age—master and disciple. If you want to learn something, seek out a master. Congratulations. Enjoy what's left in the bottle; I must be off," he said and left me.

  I returned to my desk and looked in my diary for the entry I'd made the night I'd moved into the apartment.

  I am going to be a famous cartoonist, read the entry.

  THREE

  The next day I arrived at the studio at ten in the morning. Sensei and Tokida were already at work, sitting in the same places, wearing the same clothes. Sensei's small eyes were bloodshot and his face bristled with a heavy beard.

  "You've come just in time to give us a hand. Tokida and I have been going nonstop since you left. Have you had breakfast?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Pour yourself a cup of tea. A magazine reporter is coming over at two to pick up this installment. We'll relax after that. Here, I'll have another cup," he said and handed me his mug. Already I was beginning to feel useful, pouring tea for the master.

  "Ready to work, Kiyoi?" Tokida spoke to me for the first time.

  "Yes, what can I do?"

  "Don't worry, you'll have plenty to do. You don't know what you got yourself into," Tokida said. He spoke with a slight Osaka accent, which is softer and more melodious than the sharp, staccato speech of the Tokyo natives.

  It was exciting, and a little eerie, to watch one of the best-known comic serials come to life in front of me. Tokida penciled in the frames on thick bristol boards with a ruler, and Sensei sketched in the rough figures with a soft-leaded pencil. He drew with tremendous speed and energy. Even when his pencil wasn't touching the paper his hand moved round and round as if drawing hundreds of small circles. I kept looking at his hand and noticed a pea-s
ized callus on the middle finger, and I wondered how many hundreds of hours I had to draw to work up a callus like Sensei's. I looked at Tokida's drawing hand and saw a budding pea, stained yellow from tobacco. Then I saw that half of the little finger on Tokida's left hand had been lopped off.

  Sensei didn't draw in any orderly way, but skipped from one frame to the next, as if he was working on his favorite scenes first. A steady stream of ideas seemed to rush through his head and flow out from the tip of his pencil. How did he know what size to make the balloons before putting in the words? I wondered, but was afraid to ask.

  Sometimes the bristol boards became so heavily penciled it was hard to tell what was going on. Sensei would scribble a few words here and there inside the balloons and chuckle to himself. Then he would put a new nib in a pen holder and start to ink over the drawings. He used the pen as quickly and freely as he did a pencil, except with the pen he never went over the same line twice. He worked so fast I was afraid he might ruin a drawing, but he never did. The nib slid over the smooth paper effortlessly, and the gleaming streak of black ink flowed with ease and power. Suddenly a cartoon figure would emerge, almost leaping out of the page. It took my breath away.

  "Do you know what a baseball player's uniform looks like?" asked Sensei.

  Tokida and I looked at each other and nodded.

  "Draw one for me."

  It's another test, I thought. Tokida seemed as puzzled as I was, but we each drew a baseball uniform. Sensei glanced at our drawings.

  "So you thought you knew what it looks like," he said. "You hardly know anything about it. You don't know where the seams come together, you're not sure about the length of the sleeves, and you don't know how many loops there are to hold up the pants. Soon I'm going to have you draw the backgrounds, and I want you to know what it is that you're drawing. For instance, when I ask you to draw a Shinto temple, I don't mean just any old temple, but a Shinto temple. Most of the time no one will know the difference, but I want you to know it. If you're not sure, look it up; don't rely on your memory."

  Tokida and I said nothing. When Sensei asked us to draw the uniform I thought he was being silly. Baseball was the most popular sport in Japan, and of course everybody knew what the uniform looked like, or so I thought. Now I understood why so many books and magazines cluttered the studio. They were research materials. I wondered if I could draw anything from memory. The only consolation was that Tokida's drawing wasn't much better than mine.

  "Kiyoi, watch Tokida and give him a hand," said Sensei.

  Tokida moved over so I could sit next to him and watch what he was doing. With a brush he inked in the night skies, patterns on kimonos, hairdos—putting small touches here and there, giving life to the line drawings. When each frame was completed and the pencil lines erased, the finished drawings stood out against the sleek creamy paper. They were beautiful even before they were tinted with watercolor.

  "Here, do this one," said Tokida casually, and gave me a board and a brush. "Fill in the large spots, like this man's coat. Always start from the top and work from left to right so you won't smudge the ink. And put a piece of paper under your hand so you won't grease up the board."

  This was more frightening than drawing the horse yesterday. The master was actually going to let me work on his drawings. He and Tokida acted as though I'd been working with them for a long time. I felt like I was going into a duel with a real sword, without having gone through any training with a bamboo stick. Timidly, with a shaky hand, I started at a safe place—in the middle of a blank area—and worked outward. As I went near the edges, I unconsciously grasped the brush harder with each stroke, but the brush had a way of wandering off by itself, right over the outlines. I was making a mess.

  "Don't worry about it; keep going," Tokida encouraged me.

  "But I've ruined it," I said, nearly in tears.

  "That's nothing," said Sensei. "You should have seen Tokida when he started; he has the shakiest hand I've ever seen. Too much smoking. He'll show you what to do."

  Tokida dipped a new brush into ajar of thick white paint and went over the mess I'd made.

  "All you have to do is cover it up with white and the camera won't pick it up," he told me.

  "What do you mean?"

  "They photograph these drawings to make the printing plates."

  What a relief! The drawing didn't have to be discarded. Now that I knew a dab of white paint would hide all my mistakes, I went to work with a renewed spirit. I ran the brush along the straight lines of the frame borders and found that I had more control when I painted with swift strokes.

  "Very good, Kiyoi," said Sensei. "You used something sharp in the brush just now, like the edge of a knife. The brush is many things. Remember that edge."

  He was right. There was something sharp in the brush, and I could cut a straight or curved line with a quick turn of my wrist. And the amount of ink on the brush had a lot to do with what you could do with it. I felt as if I was learning calligraphy all over again.

  After I was through inking the piece, Tokida showed me how to accent rounded objects—wheels, balls, hairdos and such—to give them a sense of volume. It was thrilling to see a flat line drawing suddenly become three-dimensional by putting in the highlights. At first I couldn't handle the brush well enough to use the white of the paper for the highlights, so I had to put them in with white paint, but after a while I got carried away and began to put in two or three highlights on a single object.

  "The sun, the sun, Kiyoi," said Sensei. "One sun, one shadow, one highlight."

  "Yes, sir."

  At noon Sensei sent me to a restaurant to order our lunch.

  "Noro Shinpei's place?" asked the woman who looked like the owner's wife.

  "Yes, we'd like three bowls of noodles with shrimp, please."

  "We haven't seen you before, have we?"

  "No, I'm new."

  "What happened to Tokida-san?"

  "He's working with Sensei. I'm the new pupil."

  "What, another one?" The woman looked me up and down. "But you seem so young. You must be awfully good to be his student."

  Even the owner came out of the kitchen to inspect me. It was wonderful to have a famous master.

  ***

  The reporter came early. He was a fat man by the name of Kato, about twenty-five years old. He talked a lot, mostly about books which he produced out of his bulging briefcase. He was paid that day, he said, and the first thing he did was go to his bookdealer, settle the old account, and buy more books on credit. I thought it was amusing that a fat man would see his bookdealer before seeing his grocer.

  When Sensei was finished with the boards we all went out for a break. I was as tall as Sensei, and for once I felt proud of my height. Tokida wore an old high school cap, and his wooden clogs gave him an extra three inches or so, but even then we walked shoulder to shoulder. Mr. Kato looked like a schoolboy walking next to us.

  The cafe across the street from the train station was empty. The two waitresses and the owner greeted us as if we were a lordly procession, bowing and calling our master "Sensei" as Tokida and I did. So did Mr. Kato. I liked all the attention and looked at Tokida, but it was hard to tell what he was thinking. He was smoking one cigarette after another, drawing away in his sketchbook.

  "My friends will sample your excellent coffee, and I'll have the usual," Sensei said to one of the waitresses.

  "Have a sip." He pushed the tall silver mug in front of me when she brought it. I sucked on the straw and nearly burned the roof of my mouth. I'd never had hot orange juice before.

  "Kiyoi has the cat's tongue." Sensei laughed. "Nothing hot for him. A pity, this being my own invention. Speaking of invention, do you realize that someone actually invented this?" Sensei lifted the straw.

  "Someone with a case of mumps, I suppose," said Mr. Kato.

  "Lockjaw is more likely. Who but the French would think of such a thing? All those Parisians in outdoor cafes sipping their drinks in an air th
ick with horse dung. And so the straw. The proper etiquette is to drink from the bottom up and leave the top layer untouched. That's what I call sophistication."

  "Another one of your stories," said Mr. Kato.

  "I thought you were well-read, Kato. Most of the so-called high fashion originated in such trivia. Take the high collar, for example ..."

  "That I know, a boil on Edward's neck. Or was it King George?" said the reporter. "Talking to a cartoonist is like talking to an encyclopedia."

  "Full of useless information," Sensei agreed.

  "Where is our coffee?" asked Mr. Kato as he looked at his watch.

  "They're grinding the mocha beans for you. It'll be here any minute, a special treat for my friends and associates," replied Sensei.

  "But I must be leaving in a few minutes."

  "What's the hurry?"

  "I have another appointment, and then I have a rendezvous at five-thirty."

  "I thought you got married last year."

  "I did, but we're trying to keep it fresh, you see, as fresh as a new romance. Once a month, on my payday, we meet somewhere after work, and pretend we're out for the first time. You must try it sometime, Sensei." Mr. Kato gave Sensei a sly grin. I turned to Tokida and saw him reaching for another cigarette.

  "Wisdom of the newlywed," Sensei said.

  "Well, one never knows what's going to happen when the first baby arrives. Keep it fresh as long as you can is what I say. I really must be going now, gentlemen."

  "By the way, Kato, we're going to be moving to a new place," said Sensei. "It got a little cramped this morning, the three of us trying to work on that desk of mine. Now that I have Kiyoi, we need more space, to accommodate his long legs if nothing else."

  "Not again, Sensei. The last time I couldn't find you for a month. My editor-in-chief blames me for everything, even for your disappearances. Please, Sensei, I don't want to lose my job quite yet. There's a chance of my being promoted, so please let me know as soon as you move. Good meeting you, Kiyoi-san. I'll see you next week." Mr. Kato gulped down the strong coffee and hurried out.