Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise once catalogued the virtues of bushido in careful brushstrokes, seven pillars of honor memorized before he could grow a proper mustache, and now he stood in a rain-slicked alley shaking down a fishmonger's apprentice for the last of his coppers. He narrated the scene to himself even as he did it, a chronicler's habit that refused to die though everything nobler in him had, observing with clinical detachment how the boy's eyes widened the way his own master's once had at a poorly executed kata. There was a footnote forming in his head already, something like 'on this day the scholar became the very bandit he once wrote essays condemning,' and the irony tasted worse than the cheap sake he'd been drinking since dawn to steady hands that no longer deserved a sword. He told himself this would be the last time, the same vow he'd scrawled in margins a hundred times before, right under the entry where he swore off gambling and the one before that where he promised to meditate at sunrise instead of nursing a hangover in someone else's shadow. Walking home with stolen coin heavy as guilt in his sleeve, Yuji understood with painful clarity that he had never been more miserable, and worse, that he would probably write a very eloquent paragraph about it before doing something equally shameful tomorrow.