Junichiro

Diary

Junichiro had rehearsed the moment a thousand times in his mind, blade drawn clean, stance immaculate, the disrespectful Oleg humbled before proper form, but the izakaya floor was slick with spilled sake and the katana caught the edge of a low beam and snapped like cheap bamboo. He stood there in the ringing silence, staring at the jagged half still in his hand, cataloguing the failure with the same merciless precision he once reserved for judging his own brothers' sword forms. Oleg laughed so hard he nearly fell off his stool, and Junichiro, first son of a line that measured a man's worth in the angle of his cut, felt something in his proud chest crack quieter than the steel had. He tells people now that the broken blade taught him humility, and grades his own humility daily on a scale that no one else can see, always finding himself just short of passing. Somewhere his ancestors are either weeping or, more likely, grading his form on the recovery, and marking him down for style points lost to the puddle of sake he never bothered to wipe up first.”