My First-experience Of The Dip Pen of Yukito's room

When I lived in Kashiwa city, Chiba, I had such a little pocket money that I couldn't buy comic magazines.
So, it was a natural custom for the Kishiros to get comic magazines and others that had been given away to collection of waste articles in the neighborhood and read them.
Then, somehow there were two copies of The Guide To Drawing Manga by Fujio Akatsuka in the salvaged stuff.
I read this book and got to know that professional cartoonists used drawing materials called "dip pens."
However, I'd never seen such a thing. Where on earth are they sold?

I visited a small stationery store "Soube-e San" in front of the elementary school I went to, and plucked up my courage to tell the store lady.
"May I have a nib and a penholder?"
She picked out the stuff which had sit at depth of the case, seemingly saying in her mind, "Oh dear, finally they were sold after a long time." As I had worried what if they were not sold there, I felt relieved, and at the same time I was surprised at the fact that even such a small store sold those stuff as usual.
A "kabura pen" (which means tulip-shaped pen) and a penholder made from plastic. The penholder has a gimmick of becoming a glass pen when the tip is removed and turned over.
I think it was around the time I was at the sixth grader in the elementary school.

After that, I got a bottle of ink from a Japanese pen manufacturer Pilot, which my mother bought for me, and began to draw with enthusiasm on a white notebook called "Jiyu chou" (free notebook) that was sold for 100 yen (or cheaper, perhaps) in a supermarket.
"Gagagaah!!!"
... Its page was torn.
Even though the color of its pages was white, the notebook had such a rough quality of paper that using erasers would make its surface peeled, so the trouble was reasonable. In addition, it was the pen pressure of a schoolchild who didn't care about adjusting.

Anyway, I pulled myself together and drew a line by my ruler.
The ruler, which I used in the school, was made of bamboo.
When I removed the ruler, there had spread the ink over the back side of it by capillarity...

I had longed drawing the universe with "beta-nuri" (painting black over certain areas), so I thrust a brush for the school art class into the inkbottle and painted earnestly.
But it was so pale that I couldn't make it real black at all...

And then, I tried to draw stars with the white of the watercolors also used in the school. Of course I didn't know suitable techniques such as sputtering those days, so I dotted them one by one.
The black of ink went mixed with white paint...(This situation is called "naku," which means crying).

Honestly, I felt "It's so useless!"

And besides, according to The Guide To Drawing Manga by Fujio Akatsuka, particular patterns such as a halftone dot should be made by using stuff called screen tones, but it didn't show the actual things, so I couldn't imagine what they were like and it had been a mystery for me for a long time.
It also advised "Using more screen tones makes the look colder, so you'd better using them moderately." Perhaps it was imprinted on my mind, even after becoming a professional comic artist, I had a feeling of refusal with abundant screen tones for a while.

Long after that, I read other manga guidebooks written by Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishimori. Compared with them, The Guide To Drawing Manga by Fujio Akatsuka had quite simple contents and missed important things out, giving out "a feel of being created easily."
Still, it is a mystery why there were two copies of it in our house, anyway...