Tokuda

Diary

Tokuda still remembers the exact pitch of his own voice cracking the paper walls of the pleasure house, roaring a challenge at the dojo master over nothing more sacred than who'd called dibs on the girl with the plum-blossom tattoo, and he has never once regretted the volume, only the timing. Stripped of rank, stripped of the title that once meant something, he wandered out into the floating world with his battle-cry intact and everywhere else in ruins, a general with no army left except the pigeons he now screams tactics at in the alley behind the sake house. He tried discipline again last spring, woke at dawn, meditated for four whole minutes, then got aped into a dice game before the incense burned out and lost his sandals, his dignity, and a small fortune on a single roll he swore was rigged by the gods themselves. Somewhere between the weed smoke and the war drum still pounding in his skull, Tokuda decided quiet men die first anyway, so he shouts his koans at strangers, laughs like thunder at his own rugged fate, and refuses, absolutely refuses, to lower his voice for anyone, master or otherwise. The dojo may have cast him out, but nobody, not one soul in this floating world, has ever managed to shut him up.