Junichiro

Diary

Junichiro had rehearsed the strike a thousand times in his mind, the perfect arc of blade meeting air with monastic precision, and so it was a special kind of humiliation that in Okinawa his actual body betrayed him, tripping backward over an unattended fruit basket and skewering a passing monkey mid-tumble. He blamed the basket's owner, the humidity, the monkey's poor timing, everything but the shaking hand that had spent more nights lately wrapped around a bottle than a sword hilt. Mortified by how far he had drifted from the disciplined blade-master he once measured himself to be, he shaved his head that same week and swore devotion to Buddha, certain that stillness and sutra would restore the exacting man he used to be. Yet even in the temple he cannot help correcting the monks' sitting posture, silently grading their bows, and losing his own composure each time incense smoke reminds him achingly of better, sharper days. He calls it enlightenment; everyone else calls it Junichiro finding a new arena in which to be furious at himself.