Gloomy Masumi

Diary

Masumi once stood on the shoreline at dusk, casting not a line but a question into the waves, asking the tide and the gulls and anyone within earshot whether his stance still looked like a swordsman's, and the silence that answered him was, he decided, the most honest review he'd ever received. He had trained for decades to need nothing from anyone, and it took one bad afternoon of fishing for compliments to remind him how hollow that training actually was, the discipline rugged clean out of him by his own hand. Now he keeps a dim, sour-smelling den where degenerate ronin ape their last coins into dice games under a single swinging lamp, and he deals the cards with the flat, unimpressed calm of a man who has already priced in everyone's disappointment. He tells himself the felt tables are just another kind of ocean, and the players just another kind of gull, except at least the gulls never owed him money. Every dawn he vows to close the place, meditate, return to the way of the blade, and every dawn the vow drowns quietly under the weight of rent, weed smoke, and the grim comfort of watching other people lose worse than he did.