Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise, self-appointed chronicler of his own decline, records the incident with the clinical detachment of a man narrating someone else's tragedy: beneath the pines, pursuing a mamasan of considerable reputation and questionable patience, he woke to find his once-proud topknot simply gone, vanished like liquidity from a rugged farm. He theorizes she took it as tribute, or perhaps as payment, or perhaps the forest itself judged him unworthy and helped itself; the samurai in him demands an investigation, the degen in him just wants to know if she left a note. He has since drafted, in his careful scholar's hand, a seventeen-point plan for self-improvement, complete with footnotes on discipline, sobriety, and the proper etiquette of courting women among trees. By footnote four he was already aped into a dice game behind the teahouse, and by footnote nine he'd traded his ceremonial comb, the last relic of the hair he lost, for three bowls of sake and a promise to himself he has already broken twice. Still he writes on, bald and beaming, insisting that a man who documents his own foolishness this thoroughly must eventually, statistically, stumble into wisdom.