You have started calling it bad luck because it is the only word you have for it.
Nothing enormous. Just a year where everything you touch comes apart a little.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. In Japanese we do not use one word for this, and the first thing a practitioner does is decide which of the two he is looking at.
One of them is a season. It arrives on a schedule, it belongs to nobody, and it passes.
The other was sent.
The Japanese calendar of unlucky years
We call it yakudoshi. Years of calamity.
They are fixed ages, the same for everyone, written down for centuries. Every January the shrines here are full of people having the year cleared off them before it starts.
- Men: 25, 42 and 61
- Women: 19, 33 and 37
- The worst of them: 42 for a man, 33 for a woman
The year before and the year after each of those count as well. So it is not one bad year. It is three.
The traditional count runs a year ahead of the Western one, so if you are 41 or 32 now, you are already in it.
Look at your own age, and then look at when this started.
A great many people write to me convinced they have been cursed, and what they have is 33.
Why those ages
Partly the numbers themselves. Spoken aloud in Japanese, 42 sounds like to die and 33 sounds like scattered and miserable.
Partly the lives behind them. These are the ages at which people here have historically taken on the most: the household, the parents, the work, the children.
Whatever you make of the wordplay, the observation underneath it has held for a very long time.
These are the years when a life is carrying the most weight, and therefore the years when it gives.
What a bad season feels like
It is wide and it is shallow.
Small things, constantly. Appliances. Delays. Minor illness that keeps returning in a slightly different form.
Nothing in it is aimed. It lands on ordinary days as readily as on important ones, and when you tell somebody about it the story sounds like a list of complaints rather than a pattern.
And it wears out. That is its most reliable feature.
A bad season is made of unrelated events, and unrelated events do not keep arriving in formation. Left alone, most of them thin inside a year.
What sent work feels like
Narrow, deep, and pointed.
Fewer events, but each one lands where it costs the most. The day that mattered. The relationship you could least afford to lose.
And it does not wear out, because something is still feeding it.
You repair one part of your life and the trouble simply moves to another. That movement is the clearest tell there is: the three patterns I look for.
The test I use to tell bad luck from a curse
Not a list of symptoms. A single question.
Is it spending itself, or is it being topped up?
A season spends itself. It is loudest at the start and quieter by the end, and looking back you can see it tapering.
Sent work does the opposite. It is often mild at first, and it settles in deeper the longer it stays.
So take the run you are in and cut it in half down the middle of its timeline.
Was the first half worse, or the second?
If the second half is worse, you are not unlucky. Something is maintaining it.
A woman wrote to me certain she was in a bad year. She was 38, so the season had technically passed her.
When we laid it out on a timeline, the first six months had been small things. The last six had taken her savings, her sleep and her sister.
Nothing that spends itself does that.
What is done for bad luck, and what is done for a curse
For a bad season, very little, and that is not a dismissal.
Here a person goes to a shrine at the start of the year and has the thing lifted off in a short rite, then keeps salt at the door until the year is out. That is genuinely the whole treatment.
Coarse sea salt, a small cone on a white dish either side of the door you use, changed each morning. The old salt goes outside, never into the sink.
For sent work, none of that reaches it.
Salt holds a threshold. It does not reach the person who is sending, and it does not touch the line running from them to you.
What has settled is cleared, and then the line itself is cut and closed. Stopping at the clearing is the part almost everybody gets wrong: how a run of bad luck is actually taken off.
What is done for a bad year, at home
Three things, and the third one will sound strange until you have seen it work.
1. Salt at the door, daily. Coarse sea salt, small cones on two white dishes either side of the door you use, changed every morning and thrown outside. Not the sink, not the bin.
2. Three nights of washing. A handful of salt in a hot bath, fifteen to twenty minutes, rinsed off head downward before you get out.
No bath is not a problem, and most of the world does not have one. Coarse salt in a bowl of hot water, poured over the shoulders and let run down in the shower, does the same work. Or salt held in wet palms and worked over the back of the neck, both wrists and both ankles, then rinsed off from the head down.
3. Yakuotoshi. Drop something on purpose.
This is the part that has no English equivalent. In a year of calamity you do not sit and guard what you have. You deliberately let one thing go.
Something of yours, with some value to you, given away or spent on other people rather than thrown out. Traditionally food and drink for others, which is why the custom looks like generosity from outside.
The logic is plain once said. A year that is going to take something takes the thing you chose instead of the thing you did not.
Once, early in the year, and not repeatedly. It is a decision rather than a habit.
If it has not run out
Time is the only honest test, and you have already given it plenty.
Nobody searches this in the first month. People search it after they have waited, and been patient, and watched it go on anyway.
If this has been going for more than a year, and the second half has been worse than the first, it is not a season and it will not end on its own.
Tell me when it started, what has been happening, and how old you were. The age alone rules a great deal in or out.
If it is a bad year, I will tell you it is a bad year and what to do about it, and that will cost you nothing: the twelve questions I ask first.
And if it is the other thing, I can take it off you.
