Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise kept records once, ledgers of troop movements and the correct etiquette for surrender, and now he keeps records of a different sort: the exact hour The English Pilot ordered a seventh round, the precise moment the whorehouse lanterns began to swim like koi in his vision, the footnote-worthy fact that he himself proposed the toast that ended his reputation for sobriety forever. He tells himself he was merely gathering material, an anthropologist among degenerates, but the anthropologist woke up on a floor that was not his own with sake-logic tattooed across his memory in someone else's handwriting. There is a discipline he practiced as a younger man, breath counted, blade steady, mind like still water, and he attempts to summon it most mornings before the shaking in his hands convinces him that tea can wait until the headache negotiates a truce. The English Pilot calls him a legend now, claps him on the back before every relapse, and Yuji records this too, dutifully, as evidence in the case against his own recovery. He is getting better, he insists, slowly, the way a ledger balances eventually, assuming no one asks about the whorehouse chapter too closely.