Junichiro

Diary

Junichiro had catalogued every failure of his lesser brothers, every imperfect stance in the dojo, every dishonor done to the family name, long before Oleg ever rolled the first paper on that gray stretch of Chiba sand. He told himself he was only observing, the way a first son must observe all things, when he accepted the joint out of what he later insisted was pure anthropological curiosity. Three inhales later the tide seemed to fold into itself with unbearable precision, the gulls arranged themselves like brushstrokes, and Junichiro achieved what he can only describe, in the privacy of his own exacting mind, as satori, though he would sooner die than use that word aloud near Oleg. He has since graded the experience an 8.7 out of 10, docking points for Oleg's terrible rolling technique and the sand that infiltrated his hakama, and he revisits the memory nightly while measuring his own posture in the mirror and finding it, as always, insufficient. His family still believes he spent that afternoon in silent meditation, and Junichiro, disciplined son that he is, has simply never corrected the record, filing the omission under acceptable margin of error.