Yamabushi, and the Forbidden Wisdoms (The Guardian – episode 4)

It was not a temple. Not even a ruin.

Just an alcove beneath a flyover, stone-faced and leaking, caught between industrial storage and a commuter station where no one looked up anymore.

And yet— it had weathered.

A gate leaned there, half-swallowed by rust. Ropes hung loose, like hair forgotten. And a votive mask rested on an iron box with no slot, no inscription, no name.

He stepped through the space— not the gate, but the air beneath it. The threshold.

And the world hushed itself.

Behind him, a train passed without sound. Ahead, the light changed. Not in brightness— in density. As if the atmosphere had been pressed with a blade.

There, beside the mask, a man stood.

No approach. No breath.

Just presence.

No colour on him. No emblem. Only the stance.

One hand loose at his side. One hand where a sword might have rested, long ago.

His face was not a face— only a direction.

His gaze was not cold— only finished.

The Guardian did not speak. The figure did not blink.

Then the yamabushi moved—once. A tilt of the head. The barest shift of weight. And the scent of pine reached them, though there were no trees.

The air tightened. Not with threat. With truth.

And the Guardian understood. Not through words. Through absence. Through the sudden collapse of doubt.

The man stepped back, and did not vanish. He became part of the structure— as if he had always been the moss on the stone, the rust on the hinge, the shadow under the canopy.

And he, The Guardian— he too became structure. The bolt that never rusts. The window that does not fog. The pause no one remembers.

But the wind shifted.

There was no reason. No summons. No call or vow.

Only this:

“You’ll be guarding, unseen.”

No more. No less.

So he left.

And the cities received him— distant, aching, closed, sometimes restless— twin cities divided by their common heritage.

They did not mark his arrival. They did not need to.

But somewhere, far from their timetables and trembling lights, the shrine still stood. The man still stood.

And though he did not move, the Five Rings spun— albeit motionless.

To those who can see it.

#theguardian #shugendo

From Yesteryears (The Guardian – episode 3)

FACES.

Faces, yes— hundreds of them thousands. Night and day. Restless. Shifting. On buses, beneath flickering lights, in the cracks between the twin cities.

Not living— not truly. Sleepwalkers, all of them, wandering from one façade to the next.

They laugh. They cry. They shout into nothing, as if noise might shield them from being unmade.

But their eyes betray them— lifeless, dulled. Only a single, weak vibration threads them together, like a wire pulled too tight across a graveyard.

The world does not weep for them. It crushes softly. Efficiently. Simply gets rid of them— as soon as they are born.

The world does not kill. It cues the noose. And every face steps forward, on time, on mark, smiling faintly as the curtain falls.

But then— one day. Or perhaps one night, (for time was thin that hour), he saw her.

Not clearly. She flickered. A pulse in the air before his gaze. A moment the city failed to blur.

Kiyomi.

She did not see him. How could she? He was folded into the landscape— between lampposts, rusting rails, muffled engines and vending light. Just another form mistaken for absence.

And he, he was not to name her. Not to reach. Not to disturb the shape she wore as she moved through the steam and heat and asphalt haze of a city roasting under a merciless sun.

Kiyomi.

Alive. But not untouched.

There was something inside her— a fear, a pain so tightly wound it mimicked focus. She walked like one disoriented but unwilling to show it. Pretending only to be lost in the maze of streets and signage, while the wound beneath her skin shivered like a thread too near breaking.

Later, as he slipped back into the city’s skin, he left behind a trail so faint they would call it mist— not knowing what it carried.

He did not look back.

But in the stillness of his path, a thought began to form. Not sharp. Not whole. Just a tremor, rising through the long quiet like smoke from an unseen flame.

A solution. Some solution.

In his lair— not a room, not a shelter, but a space the city no longer claimed— one page shifted.

Dust rose. The air stilled.

A single sheet in the unwritten diary had folded itself. Dog-eared, faintly creased— as if something unseen had marked a beginning without words.

#theguardian #gendaibudaku

Platform 3, No Tracks (The Guardian – episode 2)

steel river pulses- glass towers blink like eyelids shut no wind, just waiting

#theguardian #haibun

When The Strings Tremble (The Guardian – episode 1)

Beneath clouded light, the city folds its limbs— half-built, half-remembered. It breathes through vents and glass seams, never fully born, never truly lost.

From within the wall, I am stillness carved into structure. A flaw mistaken for design. A presence not meant to be seen.

I hear it— one note, bent by fog, drawn from a koto no hands should still be touching.

It drifts.

I do not move. But there—across the square, he walks.

He wears my outline. Carries my silence. Leaves no footsteps, only doubt.

The towers part for him like actors in a scene long forgotten. Their lights blink in patterns known only to machines and ghosts.

Two buildings face each other, siblings who never speak. One breathes in. The other exhales. Between them, he moves.

The river below holds no stars, only memory, soft as breath against an old blade’s hilt.

He pauses.

Looks up to where I dwell— within stone, within absence.

He does not see me. Yet something in him bows.

Another note. Lower this time. Like a name left in the throat of someone who no longer prays.

He descends. Mist takes him. River forgets him. The city unbuilds him.

But I remain. In lintel. In crossbeam. In the echo of the string.

A life lived twice and never wholly. A blade drawn only in remembrance.

And the koto still trembles.

#theguardian #haibun