Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise, self-appointed chronicler of his own humiliations, records the incident under the bridge with the clinical detachment of a man footnoting his own downfall: three ronin, one narrow overpass, and an unseen hand that found his flank mid-parry and lingered there like a merchant testing melons at the floor price. He tells himself, and later the tavern, that discipline demanded he finish the killing stroke first, manners second, and he did, technically, though his form wavered in a way no dojo scroll ever prepared him for. What unsettles him most, chronicler that he is, isn't the ambush or the anonymous grope itself but the traitorous little thrill that followed it, a footnote his old sensei would have struck from the record entirely. He has since tried to reclaim the stoic warrior-scholar he once was, meditating at dawn, vowing celibate focus, swearing off the memory like a man swearing off a rugged token he still checks the charts on nightly. Every attempt collapses by midmorning into him narrating the bridge scene aloud to strangers with far too much enthusiasm, proof that some men are simply better historians of their own weaknesses than masters of them.