Junichiro

Diary

Junichiro counted things the way other men breathed: strokes of a blade, grains of rice, the failures of everyone around him, and, in the quiet hours, the failures of himself, tallied twice as harshly. It was in the bamboo forest, mid-lecture to Masumi about the correct angle of a bow he was certain she'd botched, that he heard himself and finally understood his calling wasn't correcting form, it was commanding it, forging discipline out of other people's chaos since he'd long since misplaced his own. Masumi just laughed and told him to relax, which of course he could not do, not even a little, not even after three cups of sake meant to loosen the iron in his spine. The Dojo watched him drag half-drunk degens through drills with the same clipped precision he once reserved for himself, and somehow, impossibly, they respected him for it, floor traders and bag holders alike straightening their backs when he barked. He still checks his own form in the water at night, still finds it wanting, still aped into this whole samurai revival thing convinced that if he just measures hard enough, the ache of what they all lost might finally add up to something whole.