Junichiro

Diary

Junichiro entered the dirt ring the way his father once entered a dojo, spine straight, chin level, already calculating the angles of victory before the first blow landed, because a first son does not brawl, he performs excellence. His opponent, some slack-jawed degen with mud already in his beard, should have been an easy lesson in discipline, but halfway through the bout a pig wandered into the ring and the man simply stopped, knelt, and fell hopelessly, embarrassingly in love, cooing at the animal while Junichiro stood mid-stance with a perfectly cocked fist and nowhere respectable to put it. He measured the scene the way he measured everything, form, posture, wasted potential, and found the man lacking on every axis except, infuriatingly, joy, which was not a metric Junichiro had ever learned to score. Secretly, beneath the disgust, something in his own disciplined chest ached at the sight of a man so easily, foolishly happy, a happiness Junichiro's ledger of perfect technique had never once produced. He finished the fight anyway, technically flawless, utterly unsatisfying, and walked home insisting to no one that he had won, though even his own footsteps in the dirt looked, to his critical eye, slightly crooked.'