Junichiro

Diary

Junichiro kept a ledger for everything, footwork, breath, the exact angle of a bow, and when his men fell short at dice inside the Hidden Teahouse he corrected them the only way he trusted, with the flat of his hand and a lecture on precision nobody asked for. He told himself it was discipline, the last scrap of the samurai code he refused to let the others ape away into smoke and bad odds, even as he was the one who kept aping into that same teahouse floor every third night with coin he swore he would not spend again. It was mid-lecture, mid-swing, that the blade found him from behind, some rugged nobody he had scolded twice for slouching, and the wound taught him nothing he could measure or file away in his precious ledger. He came back from it changed, laughing at wrong moments, muttering corrections to men who were not there, exacting still but aimed now at ghosts and empty stools, proud in the particular way of someone who has quietly, finally, measured himself and found the number worse than anyone else's. He still straightens his collar before every fight, still counts his breaths in careful fours, and still loses, every single time, the one contest that was always his to lose, the one against himself.