The Ink-Keeper's Apprentice by Allen Say

Author:Allen Say [Say, Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

ELEVEN

It was still early when I got home that night. I took a change of clothes and went to a bathhouse. When I returned it was getting dark and I saw a light in my next-door neighbor's window. I knocked on the door.

"Come in," said Mr. Kubota. The door was unlocked so I went in, thinking that a karate expert never has to lock his door.

"Sei-san! Come in and have a seat; this'll take only a minute," he said, rinsing a pair of socks and a shirt in the washbasin.

"Am I interrupting you?" I asked out of politeness.

"Not at all. You came at the right time. Got a loan from my rich aunt and finally paid off my wine man, so my credit's good again. Got some beer and a bottle of the red stuff over there. Go in and open a beer; it's still nice and cold."

Two sweating bottles of beer and a full bottle of port wine stood on his desk. A book lay open under the desk lamp with pencil scribblings on the margins, and three pencils with the lead sharpened as thin as needles lay together like some surgical instruments on a doctor's table. There was something maddening about his orderliness. It was the sort of neatness Tokida would like to disrupt. I poured some beer into a teacup and took a sip. I was beginning to like its bitter taste.

"You can't wear the same shirt twice in this humid weather. I say it's time to shop for a wife," said Mr. Kubota, hanging the shirt and socks from a cord stretching across the open window. He put on his summer kimono and sat down.

"You haven't been around much lately," he said. "Some gahru frendo?"

"No, nothing like that," I said. I wondered why grown men liked to tease you about girl friends. "I've been working with Sensei."

"How does it feel to have your future secure at your age? What do you plan to do with your spare time?"

"I was wondering if you'd be willing to teach me karate."

"Why karate? I'd think with your background you'd lean toward swordplay," he said and sipped out of the beer bottle. He stared me in the eye even as he lifted the bottle to his lips, and it made me nervous. His were the eyes of a martial-arts expert, steady and calm eyes that never missed a thing.

"But isn't it true that karate is the most useful thing to know when you have to go against a crowd, like in a street fight, for instance?"

"Were you in a street fight?"

"No, nothing like that, Mr. Kubota. I accidentally got mixed up in a demonstration."

"The one in front of the Diet building? I heard about it; many of my friends were there. Some of them were hurt rather badly. A bad business, Sei-san; you must stay away from that sort of thing."

"I know, it was terrible; it was like war. But it was an accident, really. Did you ever get mixed up in something like that?"

"I avoid violence on principle.

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