Goro

Diary

Goro was the youngest of five brothers and had learned long ago that the surest weapon was silence, so at the onsen in the mountains above Kusatsu he simply sat, still as stone, watching the steam curl and the old men gossip, waiting for the world to reveal itself the way it always eventually did. When a strange hand found his shoulder uninvited, he did not flinch or shout, he only blinked, filed the moment away the way his old sword-master once taught him to study an opponent's footwork, and waited to see what would happen next. What happened next was a bottle of sake appearing at his elbow, then another, then a third, each one a small bribe from his own conscience for the discipline he was choosing not to have that evening. He told himself he was simply being patient with his own reaction, letting the anger and the awkwardness ferment properly before responding, but somewhere around bottle six the plan quietly dissolved into warm laughter and looser knees. By morning he could not recall the man's face, could not recall much of anything, but he floated through his hangover with the serene, unbothered calm of a monk who has finally, foolishly, found peace in all the wrong places.