The question you typed is not really the question.
Underneath it is a smaller one, and it is the one that keeps people awake.
What did I do to deserve this?
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. For fifteen years people paid me to send these things, which means I heard the reason every time.
So let me answer the smaller question first. In fifteen years of taking those orders, the person on the receiving end had almost never done anything.
Why people actually commissioned a curse
They did not arrive saying they wanted to hurt someone. Almost nobody says that out loud.
They arrived saying it was not fair.
Four reasons covered nearly all of it.
One: you got something
This was the most common by a wide margin.
The promotion. The marriage. The house. The child, especially the child.
Someone wanted what you now have, and watched you receive it.
They do not need to have been cheated out of it. They only need to have wanted it, and to have decided that you were not the right person to get it.
Which is why this kind so often starts in a good week. People come to me saying their luck turned right after the best thing that ever happened to them.
That is not irony. That is the timeline.
One client of mine sat across from me and described a woman she had been close to for twenty years.
She spoke about her warmly. She said she was a good person.
Then she told me what she wanted done to her, and the reason was that the woman had got pregnant.
Two: you ended something
A relationship that you finished and they did not agree to finish.
These were the loudest clients. They talked for an hour. They had the whole account ready, and in their version they had been destroyed.
It did not matter how the ending had actually gone. I have taken this order from people who were left, and from people who did the leaving and could not stand being forgotten.
What marks this kind afterwards is that it follows love.
The next relationship sours for no reason anyone can name. Then the one after that. People start to believe there is something wrong with them.
There is nothing wrong with them. It was aimed there on purpose.
Three: money inside a family
An inheritance. A house. A business somebody expected to be handed.
These were the coldest orders I took. No shouting. A sibling or an in-law, speaking very calmly, having thought about it for years.
This kind is slow and it goes at the money. Earnings that arrive and leave. Repairs. Demands out of nowhere.
It is also the kind most likely to be sitting on the family already, sent once before to the generation above you.
A man once told me the amount his brother had received, to the yen, and then the date, and then the amount again.
It had been seven years.
Four: you were simply in the way
This is the one people find hardest to hear, and it is the one I want you to hear most.
Sometimes the target had never met the client.
The new partner of an ex. The colleague standing between somebody and a position. The person whose only offence was being where a want was pointed.
Nothing was done to deserve it, because nothing was done at all.
If you have gone over your own conduct again and again looking for the thing you must have done, you may simply have been standing in a line of sight.
And the two nobody paid for
Not everything that reaches a person was ordered.
Some of it is carried by the family line.
Something was done to your family, or by your family, and it did not end with the people it began with.
In Japan this is kakei no noroi. It repeats at the same age and in the same shape, down a line.
Some of it is held by a place. A house, a piece of land, an object that came into the house.
If your run began when you moved, look there before you look at people.
What the reason changes
It is not idle curiosity. The reason decides whether the thing comes back after it is taken off.
Something sent over a single event tends to be finished once it is cut. The want that fired it has already been spent.
Something sent out of a standing grudge is different. The person is still there, still holding it, and a clearing on its own will only buy you months.
Those two cases need different work, and that is most of why I ask so much before I begin.
A line that is only cut can be reopened. A line that is cut and then sealed cannot.
You do not need to know why you are cursed
People write to me apologising for not knowing who or why.
You are not supposed to know. It was not done in front of you.
Identifying the kind is the first part of the work, and it is my part, not yours. Tell me when it started and what has been happening, and the shape usually tells me the rest: the twelve questions I ask before I take a case.
If what you are dealing with was worked by a practitioner rather than sent by an ordinary angry person, that changes what has to be done: how to tell whether a practitioner was involved.
Either way, it comes off from my side. You perform nothing, you confront nobody, and nothing comes back on you.
And whatever the reason turns out to be, I can already tell you it was not that you deserved it.
