Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise once kept the finest ledgers in the province, cataloguing troop movements and cherry blossoms with equal devotion, until the night a ninja ambushed him in his friend's futon and he discovered that scholarship does not, in fact, deflect a blade. He survived by luck and by rolling into a heap of laundry, and something in him quietly resigned its commission that evening, the nerve packing its bags while the body kept limping forward. Now he presides over a gambling den so grimy the dice have their own ecosystem, narrating each hand like a war chronicle, all rise and fortune and tragic reversal, as if calling the action might summon back the courage he misplaced under someone else's blanket. He still swears, every new moon, that he will return to his sutras and his sword drills, and every new moon he instead refills the sake and shuffles a deck that is missing at least one jack. He tells himself he is merely observing degeneracy for posterity's sake, a historian embedded in the ruins, though the ruins are entirely of his own patient, well documented making.