Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise once believed his greatest weapon was the pause before a sentence, the long scholarly silence that made enemies doubt themselves, but on the slopes of Mount Koriyoka that discipline evaporated the instant a rival Yakuza's underling decided the negotiation needed a hand where no hand belonged. He recorded the moment for posterity even as it happened, narrating in his own head like a man annotating his own rug pull, thinking this is, historically speaking, an escalation no scroll prepared me for. The argument itself he could have won with words alone, three centuries of samurai rhetoric aped into a single cutting remark, but dignity is hard to hold onto when someone's fingers are treating you like a floor price about to be tested. He limped back down that mountain resolved to finally practice restraint, to meditate, to choose companions with the discernment of a monk selecting sutras, and by nightfall was drinking warm sake with the same clowns who'd let the groping happen, laughing about it like fools who'd learned nothing. Still he writes it all down, because someone in this dojo has to keep the record straight, even if the wise man himself keeps failing the very lesson he's busy chronicling.