The same thing happened to your mother. And to hers.
Around the same age, in almost the same shape, and everyone in the family has a way of talking about it that stops short of saying it out loud.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. In Japanese this has a name, kakei no noroi, and it is treated as a specific thing rather than a figure of speech.
The first thing to understand about it is that it is not attached to you.
A family curse sits on the line, not the person
Everything else I deal with is aimed at somebody. A person was targeted, and the work follows that person.
This one was aimed at a house.
Not the building. The ie, the line itself, the thing that continues after the people in it have gone.
So it does not care which of you is currently standing in front of it. You are simply the one holding the position at the moment.
That is why it can skip a generation and come back, and why the person it lands on is so often the one who did the least to deserve it.
Two things repeat in a family
Only one of them is carried, and separating the two is the first thing I do.
Circumstance repeats. A trade, a town, a way of handling money, a way of choosing partners, a house that was never sold.
That is real, and it is heavy, and it produces patterns that look exactly like an inheritance because in a sense they are one.
It also responds to ordinary effort. People do climb out of it.
The other thing does not.
It repeats at a fixed age rather than a fixed situation. It arrives regardless of what the person did differently. And the family that is most careful to break the pattern is often the one it lands on hardest.
When somebody tells me they have done everything their mother did not do, and it happened anyway, I stop asking about habits.
The marks of a carried curse
Four, and I want at least two before I take the case seriously.
- The same age. Not the same decade. The same year of life, close enough that the family jokes about it.
- The same shape. The marriage goes the same way. The business fails at the same stage. The illness arrives in the same part of the body.
- A beginning somebody can name. There is usually a story. A great-grandmother, a piece of land, a debt, a betrayal, a child.
- It ignores the effort. The one who moved away, married differently and did everything else differently gets it too.
The third one is the useful one, and families almost always have it somewhere.
Ask the oldest person you are still speaking to. Not about the curse. About what happened to the family, a long time ago, that people do not talk about.
You will usually get an answer within a minute.
Where they come from
Something the family did
Land taken. A debt never settled. A person ruined, or abandoned, or written out.
What was sent at the time was aimed at the house, and a house outlives the person who was aimed at.
Something done to the family
The same thing from the other side. Somebody was wronged by your line and answered it in the only way available to them at the time.
These are the oldest cases I see. Two, three, four generations.
The dead, left unattended
This one has no equivalent in English and it is the most common of the three here.
A grave nobody visits. A line that ended and was never formally settled. A death that the family agreed not to mention.
In Japan the dead are maintained, not remembered. When the maintenance stops, something in the house starts going wrong, and it goes wrong downward through the generations rather than outward.
One form of this has no English name at all. Mizuko, the water children: pregnancies that ended, whether by loss or by choice, going back through a family.
Here they are given rites like anybody else. Where they have not been, it shows up in the women of the line, and it shows up around fertility, around the same age, in more than one generation.
Nobody is being punished for anything. This is maintenance that was not done, usually because nobody was ever told it was a thing that needed doing.
Why taking it off one person is the wrong move
This is the part I most want you to read, and it is the reason I turn work away.
A clean removal performed on one member of a line does work. That person improves.
And the weight settles on whoever is next.
Usually a sibling. Sometimes a child. I have seen it arrive on a younger brother inside a season, and the client did not connect the two events until I asked.
So if a practitioner offers to lift a family curse off you alone, and does not ask a single question about your brothers, your sisters or your children, that is the wrong practitioner.
It is also why this is the slowest thing I do. There is no version of it that is quick.
How a family curse is actually dealt with
Four stages, in this order, and the first one surprises people.
- Read the line. Not you. The shape of it across the generations you know about.
- Settle the dead. Rites for whoever was left unattended. In Japan this is where most family cases are actually resolved.
- Cut, and clear. The line itself, then what has settled on the living.
- Guard the descendants. So it does not simply move down when you are no longer the one holding the position.
The part you can do yourself
Stage two. It is the oldest domestic practice we have, and nobody needs a practitioner for it.
1. Find out who was not attended to. A grave nobody visits, a branch of the family that ended, a death that is never mentioned. The oldest relative you still speak to will usually know within a minute.
2. Set a place. A shelf or a table, cleaned, nothing else on it. If you have a photograph, it goes there. If you do not, a written name is enough, and if you do not have a name then the branch of the family will do.
3. Water first. A plain glass of fresh water, changed every morning. This is the whole of it in Japan. Water before flowers, before incense, before anything.
4. Then something burning. Incense, or a candle if incense is difficult. Once a day, for as long as it takes to say what you came to say.
5. Speak plainly. Not a prayer. Say who you are, which line you come from, and that they were not forgotten.
Do not apologise for what an ancestor did. You are not the one apologising, and an apology from the wrong person settles nothing.
6. Keep it for forty-nine days. That is the traditional span here, and the number matters less than not stopping halfway.
Starting this and abandoning it after a fortnight is worse than never starting. If you cannot keep it for seven weeks, do not begin.
Where it stops
This settles what was left unattended. It does not cut a line that somebody deliberately laid on the house, and it does nothing at all for the living.
People do report the house going quiet within the seven weeks. That is real and it is worth having.
It is also stage two of four.
It is carried out over several nights rather than one, and it is done from here. Nobody in your family has to be told, and nobody has to take part.
The full sequence and what it involves is here: removing a curse from a family line.
And if prayer is the road you would rather take with this, take it properly: the prayers used against curses.
If it happened to your parents too
Then say that in your first sentence to me, before anything about yourself.
Tell me their age when it happened and yours when it started. Tell me the shape of it in each generation. And tell me the old story, if your family has one.
People hold that last part back because it sounds like superstition or because it is somebody else’s shame.
It is frequently the whole answer.
And whatever your family did or had done to it, none of it was yours. You inherited a position, not a fault.
