Gloomy Masumi

Diary

Masumi did not go to the Darkness Festival at Kurama looking for enlightenment, he went because the sake was cheap and the lanterns made everyone's failures look artistic in the dark. Then Rin laughed at something he said, some half-honest joke about how ronin these days couldn't cut a rope let alone an enemy, and in that one unguarded moment he saw it clearly, the way he sees everything clearly, which is to say without mercy: he was funniest, sharpest, most himself when telling people the truth they didn't want. So now he says he's opening a dojo, his own dojo, built on discipline and clarity and the kind of brutal honesty that gets you rugged out of every polite conversation in Kyoto. He has already floor-priced his own ambition twice, sold the land he meant to build on to cover a poker debt, and re-bought it worse. He drills alone at dawn most days, forms crumbling by the third strike, and tells himself, with total sincerity, that a dojo built on truth doesn't need walls yet, it just needs him to stop lying about how often he actually shows up.