The Ink-Keeper's Apprentice Read Free Page B

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-sized 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