Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise kept a ledger of his own failures long before he understood that this made him a chronicler rather than a warrior, and the entry for Kiyomizu-Dera remains, by his own admission, his favorite footnote in a career of footnotes. Tasked with leading a ragged band of so-called bandits up the wooden steps toward that famous temple, he had every intention of narrating the encounter with the calm remove of a man above the fray, but somewhere between the first insult and the first thrown sandal his composure rugged itself off the floor and vanished entirely. He does not remember drawing his blade so much as he remembers the strange, blooming pride afterward, the way a degenerate gambler remembers a lucky hand rather than the wreckage it caused, and he has since told the story so many times that the bandits have grown taller and the temple steps steeper with each telling. He knows, in the scholarly part of his brain that still occasionally flickers to life between joints, that discipline was the entire point of the samurai he used to be, and that losing his temper was the opposite of the wisdom his name so generously advertises. Yet every evening, cross-legged, half-baked, ink-stained fingers trembling slightly, he writes the tale again with the same swelling chest, because some victories are meant to be understood and some are simply meant to be bragged about forever.