Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise once carried himself like a footnote in the histories he meant to write, a scholar-samurai whose ledgers of virtue were as tidy as his blade was sharp, until one fateful evening at the Edo palace when he made the grave error of debating philosophy with a table of degenerates who had aped their entire war chest into sake and dice. He tried logic, then decorum, then a raised voice, and by the time the palace guards intervened he had lost not his honor exactly but something more fragile, his nerve, the last thread tethering him to the man he used to be. Now he sits cross-legged in whatever teahouse will still serve him, ink-stained fingers trembling slightly from either inspiration or the previous night's rice wine, insisting to anyone within earshot that he is finally writing The Book, the definitive chronicle of samurai decline in an age of vice. He has, by his own scrupulous count, written four sentences in three months, each one narrating his own inability to write, which he considers, with the self-aware humor of a man watching his own rug pull in real time, either the most honest literature ever attempted or the longest procrastination in feudal history. Still he narrates on, because a chronicler without discipline is just a man talking to himself, and Yuji The Wise has decided that's a title worth losing his nerve for.