Our Lives – Scripted?

By Rei Tanotsuka, 28 May 2021

“…..if you give me inaccurate or incomplete information, I’ll be giving advice about a person who doesn’t exist……”. James J Sexton, divorce lawyer and author.

Today I’m going to write about my recent marital blitzkrieg (because that’s what this honestly feels like), albeit with a twist ending.

*Warning: this post is long and will appear like a Picasso painting…. thoughts jump around and the proportions of each point appear like caricatures. It also contains esoteric thoughts so please skip this post if things beyond the 5 sense reality hold no curiousity for you.

Many moons ago, I was part of a coupldedom that looked auspiciously like this….(mind you, we are REAL people so while the pose is a carbon copy, just imagine the couple a tad uglier, lol).

……to the past month which left me in this predicament.

WHAT HAPPENED would be THE question to ask, and my answer is as variegated as it is long. If you want a discourse that stubbornly adheres to one set of dogma, you won’t get that here. My answer contains belief systems spanning from my childhood, to states of awareness brought on through living in Japan.

Growing up, everything in life according to the Singaporean matriarch (my mum) can be boiled down to past life karma and bazi oracles. All the bad shit that will happen to us in this life, can be passed on to the next reincarnation through certain occult rituals (which can be got for a handsome sum). This is why mum insists that annual readings of one’s zodiac is imperative to living a “good” life.

Australian culture taught me God controlled all the trials and tribulations one will encounter, while the media simultaneously screeched out that science was the only valid answer. Hard sciences such as physics, and bro sciences (pseudo science) like psychology and economics were revered, but wack job sciences like astrology and hydromancy never made the cut. Astrology was for people named Francine, hair tightly wrapped in a purple head scarf and possessing at least 2 out of the 4 types of “clair’s” – clairaudience (hearing voices), clairvoyance (seeing images), clairsentience (“feels” feelings), and claircognizance (knowing without prior information).

When I moved to the land of the rising sun as a young adult, the Japanese, despite seeing renditions of the EXACT SAME problem in epic proportions, adamantly believe that each statistically significant issue, is but a mere aberration, hence things can’t be fixed because they are “unique”.

My Philosophy

This picture features a toy I “won” in a sushi joint I frequent. I mused to myself (after the excitement of opening up the useless gadget) “WHY”….why was this plastic toy made? Sure we can argue for its existence because it CAN be made, but why was it made? It has no purpose nor function, and will spend anywhere from 20-500 years doing absolutely nothing but await its biogradeable death. Children aren’t even amused by these toys anymore, and while it did serve a point of contemplation for me, is that reason enough for its materialization?

This toy was made precisely because once upon a time, someone decided it was business savvy to give out a token toy as a gimmick to attract customers. This reasoning may have made sense then, and whether conditions currently favour it or not, the system has already been set in motion.

So too with my life…..I will repeat a logical sequence of reasoning IRRESPECTIVE of whether I “believe” in that system or not. Things don’t have to be “real”, inorder for logic to work. Let me give you an example of what I mean. In Afghanistan there is a cultural practice of “Bacha Posh” where a daughter will be chosen to dress and act in lieu of a son in a family that has no male heir. Simply by dressing as a boy, all the privileges of being male are conferred to the bacha posh daughter. She may venture out by herself, or accompany a female family member with the same rights as a biological son.

What is this but cos play taken to its ultimate conclusion? The bacha posh daughter demands not only acknowledgement and full rights of autonomy from a system that distinctly favours the male, but it is also the court jester who succinctly puts the male back in his place – for the virtues of being a man rests not on musculoskeletal or cerebral difference, but on the mere configuration of cotton in a garment which denotes “male”. The labyrinth of the mind to sprout forth justifications for the imaginary as “real”, can not be underestimated.

Lest you want to lament the less than urbane practice of bacha posh, let me remind you of how stupid we are in the West – we believed that a man who was a connoiseur of tits and ass, magically qualified to act as judge, jury and executioner of global political affairs. At least bacha posh includes a makeover, Trump literally just told the world he has “changed” and sans evidence prima facie, we believed him!

What has the above crap got to do with my marital woes?

When we fall in love, roses smell like spring and every step we take in unison, feels like we just put on fresh underwear after a good bidet! It really is sublime finding out the allergies, weaknesses and glories of our partner….but then time gives us a kick up the butt when the relationship continues for weeks into months, years and finally decades.

Anyone who thinks the partner they have can be understood in this dimension of time, is either paired through superficiality (status, power, finance) or don’t really want to understand them on the “soul” level. Humans are complex and not so because we were designed that way, but because of compounding factors which turn simplicity into the Voynich transcript.

This is MY life story and is written not because it will resonate with everyone or even anyone. This is more of a journal entry for myself so that I never lose sight of the miracle that has brought forth my inconsequential life, and made it into a sliver of our collective consciousness.

I have known “P” (my husband’s atma or “soul”. I don’t believe I know who this entity really is in it’s entirety, I only identify it as my husband this time round, hence I’ll call it P), for 18 years. I met him at my ex company as I hustled as an English teacher in Japan and his reputation proceeded him – the other English teachers “warned” me he was a hot, karate champion who moonlighted as a smart ass.

True to form, he turned out to be gorgeous, all chisel jawed, dimples and eyes which looked like a pool fit for drowning lovers in – it wasn’t only me, my gay manager had a thing for him too. I didn’t know it at that time, but he was in absolute peak form after winning his second karate trophy. His confidence was a rarity in Japan where humility was and still is, the order of the day. His opening line? “Hi, I’m P and I’m really good at karate.” He remains resolute that the first time he saw me, he knew I was going to be his wife.

This was not hyperbole, because after 2 weeks of dating he introduced me to his mum which is a HUGE fricking deal in Japan. Generally speaking, you only introduce a partner who you intend to marry to parents, anything else goes under the radar. Because I’m considerably older than my husband, he told me he wanted to reassure me that this was a real commitment on his part and that marriage would rest only on factors of finance and timing, never on doubt in his heart that we were destined to be together.

Getting Married

When we married, we still had nothing much. He was a PROFESSIONAL GAMBLER, yes you read right. I married a professional pachinko player (pachi pro)! I already held a decent property portfolio by then and fully understood “what” I was marrying into.

Contrary to the mirage of problems my circle was concerned with (him gambling my assets away), I saw him as something else. He was NOT a gambler despite gambling for a living. He based all his gaming decisions on probabilities, and would not play if the odds were not in his favour. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and in the 3 years as a “pachi pro” HE NEVER LOST over the course of a month. In essence, he won 3 years straight! How many other women would have understood this? I did.

I saw that beneath the pachinko prowler facade, lay a mind that was really good at weighing risk to returns. It wasn’t only his gambling days which alluded to future success in a life path that would be unconventional, he had prior to that streak, won the number one spot in his economics degree at his university – twice. He did this all WITHOUT ever cracking open a text book. I mean this literally, all his texts which were mandatory purchases, remained virgin plastic wrapped without so much as a finger having lightly caressed the covers. He is not clever in a savant like manner, but he definitely has a mind that is unique. He “sees” things in reverse – the overall ending is known first, then he works his way through the puzzle.

I found solace in the fact that he loved me and made me happy, because essentially he was a walking, breathing tax dodge. A husband like that means no commercial mortgages, the corollary being that we would either have to save every cent outright to buy a decent home, or forever live subpar. For reference, the home I lived-in in Australia before moving to Japan featured 4 living rooms, 4 bedrooms, a rumpus room, jacuzzi and a car park capable of hosting 6 cars in one sitting.

Our affinity with each other really does reach a level of depth very few couples will see – he delisted from his family register, “koseki” for me (his parents originally opposed us marrying). Delisting from the family register in essence means severing all familial ties, both immediate and lineage wise. I was willing to give up a life of material abundance for him, along with bucking society’s taboo of an older woman with a younger man – a Herculean feat if you can understand the incessant insecurities people put in the head of the woman – “…remember he’ll trade you for a younger model even if you are the same age, what hope do you have as the older woman?”. Remember, we are talking about real life, not Hollyweird cougar scripts.

The Esoteric…..

Ever since I met P, he has said and done “strange” things…. I know you probably think he wanted to dress up as a stuffed toy and be spanked with a dildo, while true, that’s the least of it.

*He’s always said, from our first few dates until late last year, that he wants to be a grandfather, but not a father.

*Despite me giving him unbridled freedom (his curfew is 12am on weekdays, the same standard as all couples in Japan which he repeatedly breaks and I always forgive), he insists I’m “stifling” him. He has full autonomy in how he uses his money, once again very unusual in Japan as most men hand over their earnings for the wife to manage. I allow him to see other women on a friendship basis, one on one and infact encourage him to have more female friends. I generally think men can only be the best versions of themselves if they are aware of how the other 50% think.

*He has a persistent habit of befriending a person and then seeing them to a point where I would deem to be obsessive, then cold turkey, drops them eventhough there was no fallout. P simply exhausts a relationship and then it’s implicitly dissolved. I’m the only constant in his life thus far.

*His entrepreneurship seems to be in lockstep with a level of success that would traditionally be impossible – he has invented no products (nor does he sell any) and his workers initially had no “skill” to ply. His motto is SAY YES TO THE OPPORTUNITY FIRST, LEARN HOW TO DO THE JOB LATER! If I didn’t know him personally, I would say this was a whole crock of shit, but this is how he went from nothing, to building himself direct connections to Japan’s biggest decision makers in his field. It’s easy to land a meeting with a VIP of a big fancy company if you slap a moniker like Google, Amazon or KPMG next to your name, but imagine fronting up as pretty much yourself demanding to be taken seriously. Most would simply be too horrified of the potential rejection to even try bangin’ down the doors of major corporations to score even a small gig.

*Every so called enemy he encounters in the business world, inevitably end up giving him huge wads of cash. They still don’t like him but somehow end up “needing” him, so finally they pay him exorbitant fees to work with them.

Up to a month ago, I had no idea where the chutzpah to do this came from….. every entrepreneur had a tangible service, product to patent or sell, P only had pluck!

My own brand of weird

*All my life, I’ve had a quiet disdain towards alcohol…. I have never been curious about the beverage, not even as a teen. At my own wedding when French champagne was used for the toast, I clung to my no grog policy. To this day, I’ve never had a sip – no angel piss, no bubbly, nothing. Just tea, smoothies and water.

*I initially came to Japan for the coins because the exchange rate against the Aussie dollar was incredibly favourable back then. I stayed, fell in love and got married, but around 3 years ago when my husband started business travelling more frequently, I found myself wondering why I was still in Japan. On the surface, the reason for not leaving was kosher – my Japanese husband, but inside of me there was a melancholy that could not be vanquished….I honestly no longer wanted to be here despite Japan having way better levels of material bling than Australia could ever dream of. Everything is perfectly made, it’s ridiculously safe and the relaxation spots are second to none. Yet I felt just so unhappy spiritually.

*I refused to learn Japanese for the longest time eventhough I married a Japanese man and was living in Japan! I had an abject fear that if I understood Japanese, I’ll understand people talking smack about me, yet I had no plausible reason to think people would! I was popular everywhere I went and warmly welcomed.

*My mum spawned a litter, and whenever I speak to her and reminisce about her days as a young’un, she waxes lyrical about the horde of kids she and my dad wanted. There are 4 of us, but dad originally wanted half a dozen. Mum is adamant that only finances stood in the way of the clan creation, not because of the desire to have a “small” family…..YET, growing up, she reiterated ad nauseum how stupid it is to have kids! I’m not even talking about occasionally musing the benefits of a life without the pitter patter of chubby little feet, I’m talking about an unrelenting harangue on why having children is the ban of one’s existence….the fact that she had a factory of kids, produced not an ounce of irony.

My world – upside down, inside out

Post midnight April 4th 2021, after spending a genuinely lovely day together with P, he suddenly asked me “Can we talk?”.

He had just returned 3 days prior from a fortnight long business trip. He was quite cold when he first came back, treating me like an acquaintance more than anything else, but by the 3rd day he was back to his usual silly ass self…..then he dropped the bomb.

He told me that he wanted to father a child with another woman. We already spoke about this issue half a year ago. I had been resistant to having kids all throughout our relationship, something he has always known and was willing to accept before we even started dating. I was however, willing to have a child with him from last year onwards because I knew how much it meant to him (also I was no longer working 7 days a week). We had an intense discussion in July 2020, when I told him I was ok to have a child now, but he point blank stated he didn’t want a child with me because I would expect him to change. My only request was that he try to come home before 12am, a condition that hardly seems unreasonable seeing as he claims he so desperately wants a child.

When this topic resurfaced again last month, I accepted that we would separate. I also suspected that he had already met his baby mama and was just putting on a ruse for me so he wouldn’t look like a run of the mill adulterous scum most men end up becoming when they “make it” financially. However, he was vehement that when he retires, he wants to be with me. He said there’s no one else he trusts besides me, because in all our time together, I’ve never lied to him irrespective of how uncomfortable things got, and lying would have been the least affronting option to take. He also said I am the only person who truly understands him.

We exhausted all possible options: adoption, surrogacy, taking a kid from the local park (jk), but reached no outcome that would have been equitable for both of us emotionally – one side would have to lose. So I said let’s do the responsible thing and let our parents know of our decision to end the marriage amicably for practical purposes, though we would not divorce legally. Seeing as P had already decided to start recruiting for a baby mama in May, I said our relationship would be open from May onwards.

Then things got really ugly……from my perspective, it felt as though he registered none of the pain I felt over the demise of a relationship that has sustained 18 summers, springs, autumns and winters….a relationship that took alot of Western psychological theories to continue, everything from annihilating codependency to unpeeling Jung’s archetypes to search for the best way to cater to the individual I promised to sick together through thick and thin….all the nights contemplating philosophical ideas of reality, and like Descartes pondered, what if we are all living in the illusory world of the devil? What can we trust except for the fact we feel this is real even if it really is a cosmic joke? Was my marriage, something I had invested heart and soul into, the grandest joke of my life?

It seems that when things “work”, one emphatically believes in the self, that somehow it was us who overcame the obstacle to emerge triumphant, holding in our hands a self penned bible on what we did that was “right” to obtain the results we got…..when things go awry, you feel like the most competent fool because it’s only then that you understand the difference between correlation and causation. I remember the times when people marveled at our relationship, wondering out loud how we managed to stay so affectionate with each other long after the trade-in period was up. I remember confidently advising that it was imperative to be best friends and to have a sense of humour….to understand that a “life partner” relationship is based on mutual fulfillment, not on legal or societal obligations. This advice I once dispensed was a slap in my face as I sat alone at night with a husband who now refused to come home and accused me of emotional torture, adamant that he FINALLY had the gumption to tell me to stick it.

Did I really misinterpret this much?

The Woo Theory

Within days of the talk, I reached a few epiphanies….the first being the realisation that none of this was anyone’s fault. I felt that since I have wanted to return home to be with my family in Australia, the recent stunt P pulled was actually my liberation. Only he had the power to make me leave, and in my heart I felt grateful that he got to play this role…. someone else would have left scars that would never heal. I knew that despite everything that has to happen, we would end up as friends.

Then things got stranger still. About a month ago YouTube suddenly recommended a Vedic astrology video for me to watch, featuring the concept of Rahu and Ketu, something I knew nothing about. I won’t go into the rabbit hole with Jyotisha because it’s amazingly intricate, and even now after a month of daily studies, I have not even scratched past the surface.

The grand Rahu/Ketu (R/K) cycle in one’s birth sign, resurfaces every 18.6 years, so basically anything you didn’t resolve in your prior R/K grand cycle comes up again. 18.5 years ago I broke up with my ex fiance. I left him in exactly the same way my husband was now “leaving” me…..I went to another place and basically found a new life that didn’t include him. I remember his vulnerabilities as I gave the engagement ring back…..every ounce of pain he felt, every insecurity he vociferated then, now echoed though my own voice and diced it’s way into my own heart. I now know what I did 18.5 years ago, because I am now my ex fiance.

For the longest time I have felt guilt in how we ended the relationship, and I tried to contact him 2 years ago through FB, but he never responded. Making this first connection gave me peace…. I had paid back this “debt”. I no longer carry a sense of foreboding that one day my partner will leave me – it already happened.

I have no idea why this serendipitous knowledge came to me because it started to unlock EVERY ANOMALY in my life, and finally things made sense. The traits I took as simple quirks, were anything but. The mysterious tapestry of elements which appeared out of place, became the nexus for making me who I am.

Pieces Unravel

Jyotisha basically deals with 360 years of one’s existence – the most recent past life, the current life and the next incarnation. If we go by Vedic theories we have entered the age of Kali Yuga where the maximum human life span is 120 years.

I started checking into our past life, and even with this tidbit of information, was able to break the code tens of psychology books could not even begin to decipher. I didn’t even do past life regression or anything “subjective”, I literally used factual birth time data and worked out the previous incarnation. You need the exact time of your birth, timezone, longitude and latitude of your place of birth. Jyotisha isn’t a vague “science”, it’s actually a very systematic calculation.

According to Jyotisha, I was a Japanese man in my prior life, a man of scriptures (a preachy prick basically) who was renowned for giving life guidance to the locals. I charged an arm and a leg for the privilege of telling people how to live a life in accordance with the divine….then I fell from grace. I lost faith in what I was doing and turned to alcohol and prostitutes. In the end I died penniless, disgraced with a repute that was beyond salvage.

This explains my ironclad will against alcohol and learning Japanese….I carried sentiments of a ruined reputation due to alcoholism in my previous life which materialised itself this time through me being a teetotaller. It’s only fairly recently that my Japanese has reached a level of basic reading proficiency and I still self sabotage my own learning. I’ll add another twist, I started learning Japanese SIGN LANGUAGE a few months ago, this was before knowing about my past life…..it’s like I’ll do anything to not focus and learn what is absolutely necessary – Japanese! With sign language, I can’t “hear” anything….

I think my return to Japan is to try to fix what I felt was my failure in my previous incarnation……even as an English teacher I run classes more in tandem with philosophy than grammar, vocab and intonation. If I was to conjecture, I would pin my dwindling passion for Japan commencing approximately at a similar age in my previous incarnation with my downfall……

My “kid hating” mum who mass manufactured a brood? This one is even stranger…… checking the karmic debts of all my siblings and their partners, either themselves or their other half, carry a karma which results in: late age births (past the age of 30 in today’s standard), or one child with a problem or childlessness. I will admit that for the past few years I held a mild resentment towards my mum, I inadvertently blamed her for indoctrinating in us a fear of having children. Only one sibling has kids, the rest of us are all “barren”…..now I understand that destiny gave us a FANTASTIC MUM. If she was traditional and emphasized that life would only be complete with children, we would all be disheartened, feeling failure because the most basic function would either not be fulfilled, come late or come with problems. Because of her erratic “disdain” towards us having progeny, we grew up without the desire for something that we were most likely not going to be given. I could never reconcile why mum would always tell us not to have kids while she squat out 4, now I know why she had to develop this “hypocrisy” – this is her job as our mum.

Unveiling P

All across P’s birth chart is scribbled with past lives of great leadership and societal success. In this life he has no business role models. No one who he grew up with has their own business, add to that, he never reads biographies of successful entrepreneurs (unlike me who loves reading about Howard Schultz, Jack Ma, Carlos Slim etc) infact he’s not “curious” about the business world. He never utilised social media, E commerce or marketing. The website he has now was kindly “donated” by his employees who felt personal shame that they were working for a company that didn’t even have a website!

He has been the captain of industries for many life times already and hence this time round, he could succeed with literally nothing more than his attitude. He knows who to target and his achievements are literally pinned on one person who takes him to the next level. It has always been this way since he started…..

Things we regard as “gifts” are nothing more than skills we’ve accrued in past lives, and all it takes is a trigger to draw out the wisdom and knowledge again this time. Many times P has chastised me for not pursuing people who are potential big leads because he honestly can’t fathom why I can’t do what he can. He just “gets” how to get businesses and I honestly don’t. I understand financial security and stable investments, a skill I brought with me through previous lives.

My husband has a specific combination in his charts called sasa yoga, or “jumping rabbit”, basically he will always escape his enemies and turn them into an ally. This has also been a constant script, many times he has told me that a certain so and so is trying to trip him up, only to emerge a few months later handing him jobs at double his asking rate. This has got to be more than mere coincidence.

But who exactly was he one life ago? This one explains our marital situation. P was a European man and married to a violent spouse, they had 1 daughter together. The spouse had liaisons with a very unsavoury group and P’s son in law was murdered because of this connection, leaving behind his widowed daughter. She never had any children and this was something that impacted P’s past incarnation. He never became a grandfather. The karma he carries this life is either very late fatherhood, or he will not have kids at all…..when I found out about this, P’s lament of wanting to be a grandfather but not a father finally made sense.

When I saw a professional marriage counselor before things turned for the worst (an American licensed psychologist) all he could surmise was that my husband was just irresponsible and that he had ADHD! This doesn’t carry any weight because as soon as we married he took on all the traditional responsibilities, not only that, he is the only child in his family who gives his father monthly support payments. Every employee he takes on, he always does so with the best of intentions to give them proper insurance, superannuation etc, to say he’s just “irresponsible” shows nothing more than a visceral, unthinking assessment. This is why I think therapy is Western capitalism banking on vulnerability. The way Western culture functions is akin to a sophisticated 3 year old – it can only register what’s immediately infront of it.

The feeling that P has “suffered” in our marriage borders on the ludicrous if you consider the current facts, but the subconscious layer of having being abused by his former spouse probably lives on. If you look at his birth chart, he literally has a “perfect” marriage in this life. He has a vertex in the 7th house (house of marriage) and at its most simplistic interpretation, this is an element of pure chance to meet a person who will forever change your life. This connection doesn’t need to be romantic, though most people will call this person a “soulmate”. We could have never met – a vertex is usually something we only know in hindsight and is one element that can not be predicted eventhough it shows up in the chart. Most of what we will do in this life is a carry over from our past lives and they will happen anyway with no element of fate, but the vertex is seen to be a genuine coin toss – cosmic randomness.

My father in law, a few years ago gave me the jewelry of his late wife….he told me that I should keep those because I healed the relationship between himself and my husband (his son). When I first started seeing P he was petrified of his father, but very close to his mum. P and his dad are now buddies and eventhough I don’t personally think I did anything grand, his father credits me for their new relationship.

The biggest karmic battle for P this life is to choose between constructing a loving home life vs appearing successful by society’s standard but having a dysfunctional family. This same problem has emerged many life times in P’s consciousness. He has failed before because he’s been given the same trial again but this time with a “perfect” partner astrologically speaking. He must choose – to be a beautiful flower in a garden of beautiful flowers and live out a natural life, or be kept in a glasshouse and have everything perfectly catered, only to be cut when the bloom is most beautiful, and pinned on a lapel for show. This explanation is not something I made up, I just paraphrased an interpretation of his chart. He has been given a lifetime partner to help him…..this is the only person who will stay till the end, all his other relationships fade when the utility value wanes.

P’s faith that we were destined to be together and after everything, we will still be together probably isn’t a hallucination, there is one person who he meets early in his life who stays the course…… I don’t know what this truly means or if any of this is “real”. I do know that life is more magnificent than what we imagine it to be. As I said in the beginning even if all this turns out to be a creative hoax, it is a hoax that can explain my 40+ years of existence before I discovered Jyotisha…..I no longer care for the happily ever after……I’m just content that through this experience, I was able to understand myself a little more.

We have put a kibosh to further deterioration in our relationship, but are things the same as before? No. They have definitely changed. Will things be better? Don’t know, haven’t got to that part of the chart yet……