Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise once kept a scroll of maxims about serenity under pressure, a fine document he now considers deeply ironic. At the Nagasaki Lantern Festival, amid ten thousand paper lanterns and a crowd swollen with plum wine and gossip, he tripped over a woven basket of oranges and went down like a shogunate that forgot to pay its retainers. He rose with lantern wax in his topknot and a vocabulary previously unknown to any dojo, narrating his own humiliation aloud as if some future scholar might need the primary source. Yuji still tells himself discipline is a river he can step back into anytime, though lately that river is mostly bathwater and regret, and he journals about patience the way a man journals about a diet he broke at breakfast. Still, he dusts himself off, rights the basket, bows to no one in particular, and looks forward, with the stubborn hope of a chronicler who knows the next chapter is rarely the same disaster twice.