Ascendance of a Bookworm Part 1 Volume 2

Summons from Benno

Lutz and I began making the suketa together while gathering in the forest. Since the frame would be made mostly with wood, it would be relatively easy to put together thanks to our nails.

The hardest part was carving pieces of wood to be the same length. Putting the actual frame together wasn't too bad, especially since we weren't making particularly large washi this time. A suketa used for making postcard-sized pieces of washi wouldn't need a suspension to support it, for instance. I figured it would be wise to mimic the small one I had made in class once.

I drew the frame and wrote what we needed to build it on my slate to show Lutz, and he started cutting the wood while looking at it.

"Ummm, it needs to end up fitting together like this, so you need to cut the wood perfectly straight. Though we can save that for last and make corrections at the end. Well... do you think you can do it?"

"This is a bigger pain than I thought it'd be. Perfectly straight, huh...?" Lutz carved two long frames, envisioning a rectangle with an inner surface area about as large as a postcard. Once the frames for the upper keta and lower keta were ready, he attached a fixed board to them so that the upper keta wouldn't move when we were swishing around the water inside to spread the pulp. Subsequently, he put a grip on the upper keta for grasping purposes.

"You did it! Lutz, it looks great!"

"This is good enough?"

"Yeah! What we do is slide a screen between the upper and lower ketas, hold them by this grip, and shake them to get the fibers all spread out and flat. We're almost there."

Lutz questioned my "almost," so I shook the keta a bit and pointed to the open crack between them. "Ideally there won't be a crack here when the upper and lower ketas are pushed together. The frame will be done once you shave them down such that they fit together perfectly."

"Perfectly?! No way, I can't do that without my dad's tools or something..."

"...Do you think he'll lend them to you?"

"Dunno..." Apparently, Lutz was experiencing some strong kickback from his family over his choice to not follow after his parents into construction and woodworking. He definitely wasn't in a position to ask for help or to borrow tools.

Lutz's dad was of the opinion that merchants only cared about money, that they were cold-blooded monsters and he wouldn't let his own son become one of them. His mom, Karla, was constantly on his back saying that he had given up on becoming a traveling merchant, so why couldn't he give up once more and become a carpenter? There wasn't much I could do about that, since Lutz himself was determined to follow his own road in life no matter how hard his family fought back. The best I could manage was telling them how hard he was working while teaching them recipes. ...Once again, I'm pretty useless.

Even in the worst-case scenario of the keta not working at all, it wouldn't really be a problem. We could just make another one shaped a bit differently. The screen was the problem. We had to make a screen that was like a hundred pieces of bamboo stuck together. We would need a bunch of bamboo, all of similar size, plus string. Not just any string, either; it had to be strong string. We didn't have any string we could use for our own purposes, and turning the bamboo into strips also seemed hard. Although we just needed a screen the size of a postcard, I could easily imagine that it would be quite difficult to make.

"Well, we made the keta today, so let's spend tomorrow carving bamboo and making strips. But I wonder how easy it'll be to make kinda rounded bamboo strips. Maybe square strips will be fine if they're uniform in thickness and length?"

"I dunno. We just gotta try stuff and see what works..."

I wasn't much help since I couldn't use a knife very well yet, but given how many strips we needed, I had to contribute bit by bit. At least we had accomplished our goal of making the keta. That was nice.