Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise once kept ledgers of troop movements with a monk's precision; now he keeps ledgers of his own bad decisions, narrating them aloud like a man reviewing tape of his own downfall. The record shows this: he aped into the treeline behind the shrine chasing rumor of buried coin, a tip whispered by a gambler who owed him money and clearly wanted him gone, and what he found instead was a snake coiled around what turned out to be a root, not riches, and in the panic of the ambush he had already drawn steel before his scholar's brain caught up to his samurai reflexes. He tells it now with the detached wonder of a historian cataloguing his own foolishness, noting that the snake, rest its scales, never had a chance, and neither did his dignity. Yuji swears this is the turning point, the moment he trades chaos for quiet, journaling by candlelight instead of chasing floor-price rumors in the woods, yet the ink is barely dry before he's rolling a joint to calm the nerves the snake rattled loose. Discipline, he writes in his own margins, is a manuscript he keeps starting and never finishing, and he suspects future Yuji will read this page and laugh exactly as hard as present Yuji is trying not to.