Final Chapter Notes

Please note that this contains spoilers. As I wrote the early revisions of this book… I merely documented events that emotionally struck me as being important. It wouldn’t be until 10 years later that I understood the reasons that certain things were said. I knew what Inari did and said, but I didn’t know why… and as I revised this book repeatedly, I attempted to make sense of it all. Certain sentences and phrases stuck out as profound, and certain actions were utterly bizarre.

But daily I still ponder over Inari’s character and question repeatedly WHY she would do some of the things she did. The final chapter of the book is something I’ve been pondering recently, specifically the point at which Yuki drops the bomb on Inari… “I’m seeing someone else!”

I used the word “cult” very deliberately in the subtitle of the book… in a nutshell this book is about how a cult is formed, and really all that needs to happen to control a desciple in your cult, is to setup a way to disconnect logic from emotion. In fact, I see a lot of Inari in the guru from the Netflix series “Wild Country”… I recommend it. In that series, the gurus secretary falls in love with the bagwan’s deep eyes and takes care of his every need, and when she finally leaves the cult, the bagwan goes on national talk shows and says something like “she’s just upset because I wouldn’t fuck her!”

Throughout the book, Inari constantly creates paradoxes that Yuki is unable to reconcile… normal emotional responses don’t seem to apply… and normal logic doesn’t apply either. This in a nutshell is the definition of religious dogma… Accepting the illogical in exchange for emotional resolve. The sociopaths in Inari’s life were the only people who seemed to be able to resist this… this bullshit. It also fairly succinctly defines the term “gaslighting”.

At the time I wrote these final exchanges… I had no idea what “Borderline Personality Disorder” was, but since then, I’ve deliberately befriended dozens of BPD people on TikTok and found the vast majority to echo Inari on profound levels. Nothing triggered Inari like her fear of abandonment. And what Inari says in return after Yuki tells her he’s found someone… shatters her veil of innocence as she attempts to body shame a person she doesn’t know, even asking Yuki “Is she fat?” I have been thinking about how bizarrely uncharacteristic it was of Inari to say something like that… But the reality is that it happened. At this moment, Yuki finally took emotional control over Inari and she responded by forgetting how to logically check herself… She forgot about the character she was playing to pacify Yuki and responded with a raw unchecked set of statements, accusing, naturally assuming, that Yuki was just “using” some weak girl. Blindsided, her responses lack calculation and she assumes that Yuki is a human who thinks like she does and assumes that Yuki is just trying to emotionally control someone who is weaker than her.

This suggests that maybe, just maybe, Inari knew how she was playing Yuki the whole time… And sought to deliberately disconnect Yuki’s logical brain from his emotional brain in order to control him. Food for thought!

But as I sit here, I ponder… If I, myself, could pick a random person in this room full of people, someone emotionally weaker than me, and deliberately and shamelessly apply all of Inari’s tactics to make this person my own disciple, draining them of everything they have…. Like she did to me.