Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise once carried a blade with the solemnity of a man who believed his hand would never shake, and now he carries a notebook, cataloguing the exact humidity, the phase of the moon, and the tactical genius of a beetle named Genghis who, on one legendary high-moon evening, out-wrestled every other bug in the Dojo courtyard. He narrates this triumph nightly to anyone within earshot, complete with dramatic pauses, as though recounting the fall of a shogunate rather than an insect scuffle fueled by cheap sake and a suspiciously large stash of weed. Yuji tells himself he will retire the story, will finally return to his old katas at dawn like a disciplined warrior should, yet dawn keeps arriving to find him instead sketching beetle formations in the margins of his war journal. He knows, with the clarity of a true scholar, that he has become the unreliable narrator of his own decline, mythologizing a bug fight the way lesser men mythologize lost empires. Still, when the moon climbs high and full, something old and samurai-shaped stirs in his chest, and for one night he lets himself believe the legend was real, because honestly, it was.