Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise kept a mental ledger of his own legend long before anyone else thought to write it, and the entry titled The Sake House Incident remains, by his own admission, his finest and least accurate chapter. He had watched Junichiro drink through four cups with the calm of a man who had never lost a fight, and Yuji, ever the scholar of other people's mistakes, decided this was the precise moment to test a technique he had only read about and never once practiced. The strike he attempted was, in his retelling, a masterwork of angles and timing; in Junichiro's retelling, and in the recollection of everyone else in that sake house, it resembled a man tripping over his own ambition. He woke up sore, humbled, and somehow more insufferably proud than before, because now he had a story instead of a theory, and a chronicler without a story is just a man with good handwriting. He still narrates the tale nightly, embellishing the footwork a little more each time, all while promising himself, and failing beautifully, that tomorrow he will finally practice the technique before testing it on someone who can actually drink him under the table.