Gloomy Masumi

Diary

Masumi had told himself, with the flat certainty he tells himself everything, that a single cup of sake at Kiyomizu-Dera would not end in disaster, and he was wrong, because he is always wrong about the specific ways in which the world will disappoint him, only ever right about the fact that it will. The English Pilot bought round after round beneath the temple's wooden eaves, laughing about floors and rugs and other words Masumi didn't recognize but understood instinctually to be bad omens, and somewhere between the third toast and the view of Kyoto going soft and gold, his katana simply stopped being at his hip. He did not chase the thief. He did not even look for footprints. He sat very still, calculated the odds of recovery at approximately zero, and accepted the loss the way he accepts most things, as confirmation of a pattern he'd already diagrammed in his head years ago. Now he is retreating into the jungle, telling himself this is discipline, a monk's exile, a return to the blade's true spirit, when really it is just a man with no sword hiding from the temple stairs he can't stop replaying. He packed a training schedule, a strict one, and has already broken it twice before reaching the tree line, which feels, to him, less like failure than like weather.