Junichiro

Diary

Junichiro still corrects the memory nightly, the way a man sands the same board long after it is smooth: the whorehouse floor of Yoshiwara-adjacent disrepute, the drunk sparring partners he privately grades on a curve reserved for the truly hopeless, and the snake that slid across the tatami as if it too had wandered in looking for cheap sake and worse decisions. His blade found it clean, one motion, the kind of cut his father would have nodded at once and never again, which is precisely why Junichiro has replayed it ten thousand times since, hunting the flaw he is certain must be there. He tells himself the scumbags he trained beside that day were beneath his notice, yet he remembers each of their sloppy stances with the precision of a man who cannot stop measuring even what he despises. Every morning he vows discipline, rises before dawn, sets forth a schedule worthy of his ancestors, and every morning by noon he is aped into another dice game with the same clowns, chasing a floor that keeps dropping out from under his resolve. He counts the snake his one perfect strike in a decade of near-misses, and hates, more than the whorehouse, more than the scumbags, that a decade is such a long time to wait for another.