People ask for the words as though there is a correct set of them somewhere.
There is not. What there is instead is a grammar, and sentences that break it do something other than what you intended.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. I was taught one line and I have used the same one for twenty-five years, so let me take it apart rather than just hand it over.
The line I was given
In Japanese it runs:
What has lodged in this body of mine, return now to the place it came from.
Three parts, and each one is doing a specific job.
What has lodged in this body of mine. It names the thing, not the person who sent it. The subject of the sentence is the object being moved.
Return now. An instruction to that thing, in the present, with no condition attached.
To the place it came from. A destination described as a location rather than as a person. Nobody is named and nobody needs to be.
Every rule below comes out of those three parts.
The six rules for the words
- Name the road, never the walker. No name, no description of a person, no them or him or her.
- Address the thing, not a power. You are telling an object to move. You are not petitioning anybody to arrange it.
- Present tense, already true. Not a request and not a hope.
- No outcome for anybody. The sentence ends at the destination. Nothing about what happens when it arrives.
- Short enough to repeat identically. If you cannot say it three times without the wording drifting, it is too long.
- In a language you think in. A phrase you do not fully understand cannot be held steady, and holding it steady is the entire technique.
That last one matters more than authenticity. A line in Japanese, said by somebody who does not speak Japanese, is a sound rather than a sentence.
People are often disappointed by that. They wanted the foreign words to be the potent part.
The potent part is that you mean it and that it does not change. Those are the only two properties that survive translation.
Sentences that work
Any of these are fine. Choose one and never change it.
What has lodged in me, go back now to the place it came from.
This is not mine. It goes back the way it came.
This road is closed. What came down it returns.
Plain speech is not a weaker version of something. The second one is four words long in the part that matters and I have used it with clients who could not manage anything longer while they were crying.
Sentences that fail, and what they do instead
These are the four I see most, taken from what people tell me they said.
Naming the person
Return to Sarah what Sarah sent me.
You have supplied the aim, which the road was already supplying. If you are wrong about Sarah, it now goes to Sarah anyway, and it goes as something you made.
Adding what should happen
Go back, and let them feel what I have felt.
The first half is a return. The second half is a sending, and the second half is the one with your name on it.
Asking rather than instructing
Please let this be taken from me.
Not wrong, but not this working. That is a prayer, and prayer is a different road with its own rules: the prayer form of a return.
Negotiating
If someone has sent this, then let it go back to them.
An if in the sentence is doubt written into the form. Say the plain version instead, and let the road be wrong if it is wrong.
Changing it between rounds
Not a sentence at all, and the commonest fault of the five.
People improve the wording as they go. The second round sounds better than the first and the third better again.
Three improved sentences are three different workings, each run once. The repetition was the point.
Writing your own
Two tests before you use it.
Read it aloud and see whether you want to add anything. If you do, the wanting is still loud and the sentence is not the problem.
Say it three times with your eyes shut. If the wording changed, shorten it.
Then write it down and keep the paper. You will want the exact wording again in a month and memory rewrites sentences.
Keep that paper somewhere private and do not read it to anybody. A line said aloud outside the working loosens it, and that is the one piece of old advice I have never seen fail.
How it is delivered, and how many times, is a separate matter: saying it aloud, and the count.
If you are not sure your sentence is clean
Send it to me. This is a small thing to ask and nobody has ever been embarrassed after doing it.
What I look at is whether a person appears anywhere in it, and whether anything follows the destination.
Those two faults account for almost every sentence that turns a return into something else.
And if you would rather not hold any sentence at all, it is done from here and you say nothing: the full return to sender ritual.
