Chapter 6 hesitating
Although I was arrested by the Kokura Police Department on "red suspicion", the employer of the printing shop did not fire me for this.If you change to a big company, you don't know what the result will be. This is the good thing about being in a small company.
The owner of the printing office is still young, only four years behind me.This person used to work as a craftsman in Moji's offset printing factory.In order to marry his current wife, he eloped to Tokyo.His wife often brings up Tokyo or Odawara.It seems that the couple also worked in a printing factory in Odawara.As someone who can't live without Ogura, I heard her talk about Tokyo with pride.
In Tokyo, although my father's younger brother is still alive, he no longer communicates with us.
The most troublesome work at that time was pressing the trademark model and applying gold powder.Although I am an apprentice painting patterns, but because it is such a printing shop, there are only three or four craftsmen, and I have to take care of all the lowest jobs.Now, I heard that the mold making has also been mechanized, but at that time it was necessary to use the manual cutting machine used in the bookbinding factory one by one.I piled a sheet of paper with dozens of oval, plum blossom, and cherry blossom shapes on top of dozens of layers, and turned the handle of the cutting machine.This job requires a lot of strength, and if you don't use your strength, you won't be able to cut through the bottom.
When applying gold powder, first brush it with brown ink soaked in green lacquer, then dip the cotton on the gold powder and apply it, and then dust it with a feather duster, and the ink is stained with gold powder.The so-called gold powder is naturally some copper powder, which is extremely light.No matter how you cover your face and body with a cloth, the gold powder will fly in when you do this job, making your nose full of gold powder.This work is difficult because the gold powder needs to be placed on the ground one by one. The more the quantity, the more difficult it is. Unlike now, machines can be used now.
Parents' business went from bad to worse.Even though I don't want to, I still have to do this job.When I get busy, I have to work overtime until almost twelve o'clock at night, and it continues every night.
Before I knew it, I was twenty-five years old, but I was still treated as an apprentice.Sometimes when I meet my former elementary school classmates wearing suits and walking on the street, I feel that I am too miserable.I wear a kimono and clogs to work, and then I change into dirty work clothes at the printing office.
Soon, that printing house also closed down.The technology of the printing house is good, but it is a pity that because of lack of capital, it has to contract the work of other printing houses.Although he was busy all the time, he couldn't make any money.In addition, the shop owner was addicted to playing mahjong and neglected his work, which made the situation even more difficult. In the end, the couple fled to Tokyo as if they were running away in the dark.
Up to that point, I had met many wandering artisans.At that time, the most important thing in lithographic printing was "color engraving artist".The so-called color separation plate is to paint the printed matter of three-color printing and four-color printing respectively to make the original plate. In the era when the original color plate was underdeveloped, it was decomposed by hand.The gradual thickening and fading of the shades is done by rubbing ink on the mesh of the film called "film", and spreading it from above to the plate.Mastering the shading method requires a lot of skills, and craftsmen with poor skills will not print well.Its effect depends on the craftsman's feeling and skill.
No matter which lithograph printing house, it suffers from a shortage of color engraving workers.Painters know this, wander around, employers let them do it two or three times, and hire them after a test.Such craftsmen can get a lot of money, so many people live a dissolute life.
Those craftsmen, after convincing their masters of their abilities, went to brothels or third-class restaurants to find women in a blink of an eye.As soon as people say why they haven't been seen for two or three days, someone will come to the employer immediately and ask the employer to pay them for visiting the brothel.They also prey on the employer's weakness.There are also guys who, when they come out in the morning, don't care about wearing a woman's belt as if it were their own trouser belt.They didn't stay in a printing office for long, and they always thought that with their skills, in Japan, heaven and food would follow.With a carving knife in hand, they wandered around.A carving knife is a tool for plate making, just as a tailor in a clothing store carries scissors in his hand, and a barber in a barber shop carries a razor in his pocket.
Among the wandering artisans, there are also elderly ones.Some of them felt that they were painters and put on black coats like painters.It seems that a life of waste does not make any man feel straight.But because they chatted all over the world.I really envy them, they are not like me, they are bound by their parents for ten years, and they can't even go out of the streets of Xiaocang.
One evening, at the orders of the owner of the printing house, I took one of these artisans to an inn.
Most of the craftsmen stayed in the houses that provided meals for a long time, and now he was allowed to live in a dilapidated hotel.I couldn't help feeling deserted as I carried the craftsman's wretched little luggage through the dark passage.
The owner and couple of the printing shop went to Tokyo from Okura Station, and I went to the station with a young mechanical apprentice to see him off.The woman had an older brother who used to be a joiner in the country, and later came to the brother and his wife to do bookbinding.He is a joiner, so his hands are very dexterous.
"It's really extravagant!" The elder brother came to the living room on the second floor of the brother and his wife's house and looked around.As far as furnishing is concerned, the house was equipped with all the luxuries of the time.His older brother lived in poverty elsewhere.Although there is a gap in age between me and this person, we get along very well.He is good-natured, but somewhat cunning.
When the owner and his wife fled to Tokyo, I quietly saw them off on the station platform.The owner's wife took away some parts of the Singer sewing machine for the sake of weak offspring.Because they are heavily in debt and afraid of being taken away.However, the young couple showed no gloomy expression.
When this printing house fell down, I was obliged to return to the same printing house where I had been.At that time, I was already more or less like a craftsman.As mentioned earlier, because of my low technical level, I was an apprentice at the Shimai Printing Office in Hakata.
In my life in Bodo, I felt a kind of freedom away from my parents for the first time.At that time, my salary was very low, and I didn’t even have money to watch movies on holidays, so I could only wander around the city as a pastime.
My father often writes to me.When the season changes, I send my clothes in small parcels.Because my mother can't write, my father's letters always contain my mother's exhortations.
I finally couldn't stand the lonely life in Hakata.At the beginning of May, I went back to Kokura again.Wearing crumpled twill serge clothes, I looked out the window of the train at the scene of the rapeseed flowers blooming in the Kayue area.How will I live in the future.I feel bleak about the future.
When I was in Hakata, I came back about once a month.Don't mention how happy my mother is.But life became more and more difficult, and finally I returned home from Bodo and worked in the printing office I had worked in the past. At that time, my father was also forced by debts, and finally got into the business of selling fish.At this time, my father was nearly sixty years old.Come to think of it, the period when my father was most proud was in the restaurant near the front market. Although the scale was small, it was very prosperous. He even fantasized about building more houses in the future.At that time, the downstairs of my house was an ordinary restaurant. Although the second floor was dirty, it was used as a living room for customers.
There was a maid who was attentive to customers in the store, so many customers came and went. After the maid returned to her hometown of Sasebo, the number of customers in the store decreased.That maid has a man.My father had gone to the countryside of Sasebo to look for that maid, begging her in vain to come back anyway.Father was really restless this time.But the carefree father was not so depressed. After he came back, he talked about what he had seen and heard about Sasebo with great enthusiasm.Father gesticulated and said to anyone; "Wait a minute." It seemed that the maid was still the guide during the tour.
It was the experience of running that tavern that father and mother started to be fishmongers again at this age.The business involves loading fish boxes on two-wheeled carts and selling them in rural areas three or four miles away from Xiaocang.Mother couldn't walk too far, so she walked around the countryside about two miles away.
The market is located near the trattoria that used to be my family's heyday.Therefore, it must be embarrassing to be seen by the neighbors in the past.However, this is probably just the mother's thoughts, and the father doesn't seem to feel embarrassed.Because of his burly physique, he held the iron handle with one hand, which was already a habitual movement, shaking his shoulders, and pulling a two-wheeled cart, his image was not inferior to that of young people.
But at the beginning, the fish could not be sold, and almost all of them were left home.Going so far away and mingling with fellow travelers from the past won't make much of a difference.However, just like that, the range of customers has gradually expanded.Most of the customers are in the mountains, and it takes half a mile or one mile to go to the nearby village.My father was already sixty years old, but he didn't look very tired when he came back, but he had a strong fishy smell on his body.
As usual, my father likes to talk, and he probably bragged about his "knowledge" to the customers in the country while selling fish.When he came home, he was often proud of it.Although he didn't make much money, his family finances finally improved.
On the other hand, I can get more or less like a craftsman's wages.Since then, shops commissioning printing have begun to pay attention to pattern design, and people like me have also been valued by printing shop owners.He even avoided other workers and gave me a little special allowance.
However, my place of work is still in the back door of the kitchen.Put machines there and work late at night.I can't live without the smell of pickles and the sound of bath water.
Although my income has increased, I am not rich.I still go to work in the printing office in my crumpled clothes and worn clogs.
The storefront of this printing office is a tatami mat room that is often seen in old stores, and three or four clerks are sitting there.The business method is the old one. The shop owner works hard, moving his fat and short body tirelessly, and goes to various companies to place orders.His face is always red, so his name "Kintaro" seems to be a nickname.
As soon as the shopkeeper returned to the factory, he yelled at the workers.The main body of the printing house is the letterpress, and the lithography is an accessory.The shopkeeper, who came from a letterpress guy, didn't know much about lithographs, so he was somewhat apprehensive.
Once, when I went to the store on business, I saw a 34-year-old, short and fat man in a suit standing on the unpaved floor of the room, begging for something from the owner.He is a new painter and a wandering craftsman, and he has a wife.So he behaved well, unlike those bachelors who were dissolute.However, I couldn't bear to see him take his wife to one printing office after another to intercede.I understand how scary it is to be in this artisan world.
As long as you have no funds, you must live the life of a craftsman in a printing shop all your life.In fact, there were several bald artisans at the letterpress side.They have a hard life and are very poor.Sitting in the dark and cold working place in the kitchen on a winter night, I also had to think about my fate, but there was no way to get rid of this kind of life.
Just a little bit of comfort, the pattern I painted was more or less liked by the owner of the order.Once, a beautiful Western-style pastry shop was about to open in Ogura, and its wrapping paper decided to invite a famous Tokyo painter to draw.It seems that the boss's niece was born in Fukuoka Women's College. Because she is familiar with the painter, she asked the painter.Not long after hearing this, I was called to the second floor of the printing office.
The second floor of the printing office is the residence of the owner's family, and the furniture is extremely luxurious in my eyes.There is a rosewood table in the middle of the twelve-fold living room. The young painter from Tokyo is flipping through something like a catalog. He is a handsome man who looks a lot like Hayakawa Sessu.The shopkeeper's two daughters and his niece who graduated from a women's college stood beside him, serving the painter in fear.
A painter in Tokyo selected pottery-like patterns from catalogs in antique shops and ordered me to unfold them properly and draw patterns on wrapping paper.How is this going?Is this just to use the pictures in the catalog to match it?The painter said: "But I will write the words." At that time, he was considered a cubist or something, and he was rated as a second-rate new writer.
Before I knew it, I was twenty-seven years old.
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