Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise keeps a ledger of his own decline the way other men keep a diary of conquests, and the entry titled Emperor's Palace remains, by his own admission, the finest chapter he ever lived and the worst he ever recovered from. There he serenaded the courtesans with verses so polished the court scribes begged to copy them, and for one shining season he was favored, fed, and flush, a poet-samurai riding the top of the floor before he understood there was a floor to fall through. Now he narrates his own hermitage from a shack that smells permanently of weed and old scrolls, informing an audience of exactly no one that he has retreated to sharpen his mind, though the sharpening mostly involves rereading his own compliments from decades ago. He still rises at dawn to practice discipline, lighting incense and vowing silence and stillness, only to be found by noon narrating his failures aloud to a stray heron because the silence got boring and the stillness got aped by a nap. Yuji insists the hermit years are a scholar's necessary exile, and perhaps they are, though the ledger, if he is honest, still opens every night to the same dog-eared page where the Emperor's Palace glittered and he was, however briefly, someone worth serenading back.